Da’Vella Gore, who originally developed Lake Hayes’ Stoneridge Estate - including a wedding chapel, gardens and a vineyard - was born in Cromwell but grew up in Queenstown, where her mum had a shop at the top of what became The Mall.
She met her husband, Vance, in Queenstown, before they shifted to a sheep and cattle farm in Mangakino, in the North Island, when their son, Wayne, was 1.
After the marriage split up several years later, Mrs Gore moved with Wayne to her mum’s place in the Coromandel.
During a life-threatening illness, she was urged to paint by her mum, little knowing she would become a celebrated landscape painter and art tutor.
After moving between the Coromandel and Gisborne, Mrs Gore shifted back to Queenstown in 1980, bought a rabbit-infested Lake Hayes section and picked up the remnants of Catholic churches in Winton and Hokitika.
The first was used to build her house and the second was largely used for a wedding chapel.
That chapel started life as an art gallery, but Wayne said "after about six months of hanging paintings, too many people asked [if] they [could] have their ceremony in there".
Subsequently, Mrs Gore became a wedding celebrant, marrying at least 600 couples in either the chapel or gardens, which themselves became a tourist attraction.
After a debilitating car crash in the North Island in the early ’90s restricted her ability to paint, she took up writing and wrote four humorous books, plus two books of landscape paintings.
In about 2000, Wayne and his wife, Suzanne, joined his mother at Stoneridge after she asked him to help out.
"We built what was the lodge out of a church Mum hadn’t used - the Howe St Methodist Church, Dunedin."
Mrs Gore would spend summers at Lake Hayes and winters in her Coromandel home. However, over the past year she shifted with Wayne and his family between Christchurch, where she died after a major stroke, and Queenstown.
Wayne said she left an amazing legacy - "she resonated with so many people".
Her funeral and memorial service is at Stoneridge’s Chapel by the Lake tomorrow at 10am (RSVP Stoneridge).
