The Lyttelton Coffee Company co-owner on the dramatic day a year ago, and his ambitious rebuild project.
Stephen Mateer at the Lyttelton Coffee Co. Photograph: T Manhire
Pretty much everyone in Lyttelton already knew Steve Mateer, the guy from the Coffee Company, but his fame reached a peak shortly after the February 2011 earthquake, when he skateboarded back into the port town from the hills above.
“I was near the cliff at Windy Point, when the quake hit, and pretty much saw the cliff fall over in front of the car, and thought, Jeez, this is like an Indiana Jones movie or something. I couldn’t really believe it. After the earthquake, the boulders just kept coming, and clonking down on to the road.”
He backed the car to the top of the hill, but it was unpassable. Anxious to get back into Lyttelton and check on his children, he grabbed his skateboard. “I ended up skating most of the way down, and just locked into a mindset.”
The February quake irreversibly changed the architectural character of Lyttelton, destroying or condemning to demolition dozens of the heritage buildings for which it was famous.
One of the few structures being resuscitated is the 1923 brick building that houses the Lyttelton Coffee Company, co-owned by Mateer, on London Street. For most of the last 12 months, he has been working on the site, which today comprises at first glance simply an imposing, wharenui-evoking steel frame. Beneath the structure, installed before opening in 2007, the foundations are being rebuilt.
“There were two options,” says Mateer. “Pull it down and build again. Or try and put it back. We’ve even saved the bricks and cut the faces off them. We’re going to tile the insides with the old bricks. Because they’re such big spaces we need big walls.
“People say that’s a silly idea because the public are scared of bricks now, but that will change. People will start looking for those spaces again. Beautiful brick buildings: people will start missing them.
“I get a lot of people asking when it will be open, and that’s difficult, because I know all they want is somewhere to go and feel comfortable and have a coffee and chat. When you don’t have answers for people it’s difficult.”
A year on, while Mateer has noticed a growing sense of “frustration and scratchiness” in the town, his own energy somehow remains undimmed. But it has been a slog.
“I’ve worked harder than Tony Marryatt, that’s for sure,” he says with a laugh, referring to the unloved chief executive of the Christchurch City Council, who responded to outcry over a pay increase by saying, “I’ve never worked so hard in my life.”
“I’ve been getting home at midnight, getting six hours sleep, then getting back here. But it’s not bad. It’s an amazing challenge to be given.”
Immediately after the February quake destroyed the cafe, Mateer hauled his espresso machine out on to the street amid the rubble and gave away coffee to locals.
“We did that as much for our own sanity as anyone else’s,” he says. “There’s a whole lot of coffee sitting there. It’s got to be used. After a while we took a koha and it was amazing, because at the end of the day there was more money in there than if we’d charged for the coffees. So we started giving that money out to some of the families round here, families that were in trouble.”