Scoundrel's lair

Art collector and now convicted sex offender James Wallace gave MICHELE HEWITSON a rare interview back in 2011.

-  MICHELE HEWITSON

To get to the front door of Rannoch, the Arts and Crafts-style house always described as a mansion, you drive down a private lane. The house is shrouded from view by dense planting. It says, like the houses of any very rich person, that this is a private place, a sanctuary. As you wind up the driveway, there are glimpses of sculptures, of the house. In retrospect, given what we now know about its owner, it seems to be a shadowy place, a place where ill-kept secrets were concealed. There is an air of the Gothic about Rannoch.

In 2011, I knocked on the front door and Sir James Wallace answered. I was there to talk to him for a newspaper profile. He almost never gave personal interviews. But he was friendly, in his austere, almost aristocratic manner. He had an old-fashioned, gentlemanly manner. I liked him. But you could not describe him as effusive.

Lots of awfully rich people are elusive. They can afford to be. Money gives you immunity from scrutiny. 

He had just been knighted. He wore to his investiture his clan kilt. His gong was for services to the arts. His trust, the James Wallace Arts Trust Collection - now renamed the Arts House Trust gives about $2 million a year to various art projects.

If you knocked on the front door of Rannoch today, he couldn't answer. He's no longer home. He's serving two years and four months in Auckland's Mt Eden Prison after being found guilty of indecent assault against three men, and two charges of attempting to dissuade a witness from testifying. Perhaps fittingly, Mt Eden Prison is a Gothic pile.