The house Mason designed was an Italianate mansion -- grand in ambition, awkward in execution. Built entirely of wood, it imitated stone masonry in a way that critics found dishonest. The flat, pasteboard effect of the facade drew complaints from architects and the public alike. There was something uncomfortably colonial about it: a young settlement in the South Pacific trying to look like something from the Italian countryside, using timber because that was what New Zealand had. Governor Gore Browne lobbied in the 1860s for a proper stone Gothic residence in the nearby Auckland Domain, modeled on Government House in Sydney, but the Weld administration refused funds. The capital might move to Wellington, which would make an expensive Auckland Government House pointless. The wooden Italianate would have to do.

Wellington became the capital in 1864, but Auckland did not give up its Government House quietly. The government found itself maintaining two residences for the governor -- an extravagance in a country as small as New Zealand, yet one that persists to this day, with the governor-general still alternating between the two cities. At one point there were vice-regal residences in Christchurch and Palmerston North as well. The Palmerston North house, now called Caccia-Birch, became the governor-general's residence from 1908 to 1910 after Lord Plunket lent the Wellington residence to Parliament following the 1907 fire that gutted the Parliament Buildings. In 1865, a ballroom was added to the Auckland house for the intended visit of Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh -- who could not come because of an assassination attempt on his life in Sydney in 1868. He visited New Zealand the following year.

Six members of the royal family have stayed at Old Government House over the years. The most notable visit came on 23 December 1953, when Queen Elizabeth II broadcast her Christmas speech from the building -- one of the first times the address was delivered outside Britain. The house and its grounds accumulated the gestures that vice-regal life requires: specimen trees planted by visiting dignitaries and governors, a rose garden tended by successive governors' wives, garden parties on the front lawn that became a social fixture for Auckland's establishment. Sir George Grey, who had watched the first Government House burn, was among those who planted trees in the grounds. The house was registered as a Category I heritage structure by the New Zealand Historic Places Trust on 24 November 1983.

By the mid-twentieth century, Old Government House was feeling hemmed in. Apartment blocks on Waterloo Quadrant closed in around it, and the vice-regal atmosphere faded. In 1969, Sir Frank and Lady Mappin donated a new Government House -- Birchlands, in Mount Eden -- and the old building on Waterloo Quadrant became part of the University of Auckland. The transformation was thorough and unsentimental. The former ballroom is now a lecture theatre. The main rooms serve as a staff common room, a council reception suite, and flats for visiting academics. The original detailing survives in the principal rooms, but the atmosphere, as one description has it, is "fairly institutional." New Zealand art from the university's collection hangs on walls that once displayed vice-regal portraits. Garden parties still happen on the front lawn, continuing a tradition that began when Auckland was the capital and this wooden Italianate house was the most important address in the country.