A carved wooden model of a Māori meeting house or whare whakairo with a plain steeply pitched roof, carved bargeboards, and a mask at the front apex of the roof. The front and back are heavily decorated with vertical bands of standing figures and faces with protruding tongues and haliotis-shell eyes. The long sides are decorated with applied wooden plaques of carved Māori figures separated by black narrow strips of black wood. One of the long sides opens as a drawer. It stands on ten short feet (an eleventh is missing).  Accompanied by a Māori wooden table (RCIN 69410) on which the house is designed to stand.

Meeting houses served as a central place for community and religious gatherings within Māori villages from at least the mid-nineteenth century. Like storehouses and other dwellings, they were built to a number of regular designs, almost always with open porches and often with carved ancestral figures on the interior, exterior or porch area.  In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, carved models began to be given as gifts to royal visitors as a token of loyalty, often made by the most prestigious carvers.