The Homestead at Keirunga Gardens in Havelock North was the ideal place to send off journalist and artist Paul Bennett, who was 84 when he died after the car he was driving hit a bridge abutment on Waimarama Rd.
It was to Keirunga that he had taken his children when they were young, so they could play in a natural setting outside while he put his creativity to work with a bit of pottery inside.
And it was there that he would spend many hours after retiring from almost 40 years in newspapers, indulging his skills in watercolour painting. Several examples lined the walls during a memorial service last Wednesday, three days after his family had bade him farewell at a private cremation.
Born in Te Kuiti, two months' premature, he was about 10 when the family moved to Hawke's Bay, living first in Hastings where he attended Mahora School.
He was at Napier Intermediate in 1939 at the outbreak of World War II, during which he acted as a Civil Defence message runner, and completed his schooling at Napier Boys' High.
He gained ordination in the Anglican Church but ultimately chose journalism as a career, which he began at the Taihape Times in the mid-1950s.
Having married in 1954, he returned to Hawke's Bay in the early 1960s with his family to work at the Central Hawke's Bay Press, published five days a week in Waipukurau but later merged with the Waipawa Mail to create the CHB Mail, a weekly community paper.
These were small newspapers on which budding journalists tended to be able to avail themselves of broad skills, which were quickly evident when in 1966 he moved to Havelock North and began working as a subeditor at Hastings' daily newspaper, the Hawke's Bay Herald Tribune.
Remarried in 1975, he continued working for the paper, taking charge of the arts page and literary pages and becoming an associate editor and leader writer up to his retirement in the early 1990s.
"He was one of the self-taught journalists," said last editor James Morgan. "He learnt his trade on a couple of small papers, and really blossomed and won respect for his work at the Tribune."
The arts and literary pages were well regarded nationally, and as a leader writer his precise and intelligent handling of the topics of the day assigned by Mr Morgan and predecessor Len Anderson gave a particularly authoritative edge to the pages of the provincial press.
An avid fisherman in the rivers and streams of Hawke's Bay in his time away from work, his retirement gave him time to blossom in his second sphere of creativeness, the watercolour painting in which he became an integral member of the Keirunga Painters.
In the latter years of his journalistic career he had also begun working on a family history, The Bennetts of Pencarrow, linked to the arrival of his great-great-grandparents in Wellington in 1840, and George Bennett's establishment as Keeper of the Light at Pencarrow Head in 1852.
His intrigue with the subject took him back to England and in time to visit the country homestead where his great-great-grandmother Mary had lived in Yorkshire, developing new friendships with distant relatives which were to endure.
He was also known for a broad sense of humour, evident in a variety of pranks and escapades as a youngster, penned in his own words and related at the service by daughter Paulette.
He was also a man of contradictions, said son Chris. "He was old school but he had a Facebook page."
Mr Bennett's creative bent was also displayed as he was an accomplished organist who played for congregations at the Anglican churches in Waipukurau and Hastings and, as a keen gardener, with a deep knowledge of native species and life in the New Zealand wilds, evident in his establishment of native reserves on Pakowhai Rd and off Te Mata Rd.
He is survived by his three daughters and two of his three sons, with eight grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.