Honouring Da’Vella Gore - renowned NZ artist, author, celebrant and Stoneridge founder

One of Queenstown’s most loved artists, Da’Vella Gore, will be farewelled this Saturday (March 18) at a service at her beloved Stoneridge Estate Chapel overlooking Lake Hayes, which all began out of her passion for old church buildings.

Renowned not only as an artist for more than 30 years, but an art tutor, wedding celebrant, gardener and author, Da’Vella was 84 and only retired reluctantly as a wedding celebrant four years ago, son Wayne says.

Born in Cromwell in 1938 and educated in Queenstown, Da’Vella didn’t learn how to paint until 1973 when her mother, then a motelier in the Whitianga, was nursing her back from a long illness. “Grandma bought her a set of paints as therapy and once she discovered she could paint she came under the mentorship of NZ artists like Peter Williams, Ben Hoand John Crump before heading to New York to study art,” says Wayne.

Da’Vella’s mother Mary Perks originally owned the dress shop at the top of Queenstown Mall, Her dad, Ray Perks, was a builder. Da’Vella’s exhusband Vance was an Otago Ski Team racer, and she loved snow skiing, but was also believed to be one of the first women locally to waterski on Lake Wakatipu, says Wayne.

The Gores farmed near Taupo, then in 1980 Da’Vella moved back to Queenstown with Wayne and she bought a section above Lake Hayes.

“In 1981 Mum began to build the “Chapel By The Lake” at Stoneridge, reconstructing it from recycled parts of two old churches in Winton and Hokitika.” She restored and sanded back all the materials, old trusses, and retrieved old Welsh Slate from a southern hospital.”

It was a long, painstaking battle with many struggles, as Da’Vella documented with good humour in the first of her six books, “This Blessed House’. Family friend Barry Spooner helped her build the chapel and it was her art gallery for a short time.

People asked if they could get married there so she gained resource consent to hold weddings, says Wayne.

A keen gardener, Da’Vella’s beautiful, expansive gardens with ponds and bridges are still immensely popular as a wedding backdrop. She became a marriage celebrant in the late 1990s, marrying hundreds of couples from around the globe and locally. Japanese and Chinese couples were particularly fond of Stoneridge’s spectacular views and gardens.

Wayne now runs the business and the function venue and lodge, also created out of an old Dunedin church, with wife, Suzanne, after they added onto what Da’Vella started. Thousands of people have been married, or stayed, at Stoneridge, even legendary All Black captain Richie McCaw.

Throughout the years Da’Vella also tried her hand at viticulture, developing a vineyard on the property – the subject of more amusing tales in another of her light-hearted books.

As a teenager, Wayne was builder and stonemason assistant helping his mother. “I thought I was doing a good job, but I’m still fixing some of that now,” he smiles. There were many funny memories as his mother battled the odds to develop the property, with his help, into what it is today.

“Mum stored the caravan at Arthur’s Point Camping Ground and when I was about nine we went to collect it to go to Glenorchy. We were up the Glenorchy Road and suddenly Mum noticed people in the caravan trying to wave at her through the window,” laughs Wayne. “She’d forgotten that she told the camp they could let it out to help pay the storage fees.”

It took three years for Da’Vella to walk again after a serious car crash in Northland in the 1990s dealt her some horrific injuries, badly affecting her sight and meaning she couldn’t paint. She always said her faith and son Wayne, had helped her through.

For many years Da’Vella, who became in demand around NZ as an inspirational celebrity speaker and art tutor, held art classes in her beautiful gardens high above Lake Hayes. She held garden tours, offering morning teas, and even exhibited her art in the US and Australia.

Da’Vella teaching one of her popular art classes from beside the Stoneridge wedding chapel that she developed above Lake Hayes

Thanks to her vision, Stoneridge is now one of the region’s most picturesque and sought after wedding venues, even attracting international fame when the final of the US series of The Bachelor was filmed there.

“When I was young I couldn’t see what Mum was trying to create,” says Wayne. “She’s always been driven – a warrior and a fighter, full of tenacity. When she really set her mind to things there was no limit on what she could achieve. She’s certainly been an inspiration to my sister, Dale, and I, and her five grandchildren.”