SUMMER HOUSES - a well-titled book

MARK BROATCH - Sunday Star Times, 13/11/2011

Simon Devitt

SNEAKING A PEEK: A house in Herne Bay, Auckland, designed by Andre Hodgskin at Architex.

If you spend any time looking through home and garden magazines, you will soon experience a powerful sense of deja vu. The same few houses feature again and again. This is in part because they are, many of them, unusually beautiful, perfect things of wood and metal and stone midwifed into the world by well-spectacled architects and fastidious builders. It is partly because their owners are house-proud, easily persuaded by the aforementioned to allow a photographer to lurk for just the right sunset. It's also surely about the fact that so few of us get architects to design our homes – our biggest investment by far. Whether that's because we are too poor as a nation, financially pragmatic or plain old niggardly, or just too in love with the idea of DIY, it's hard to say.

We look at such mags and coffee table books for two main reasons. The first is to steal ideas for our own renovations. No one works from a blank slate. And once we have seen good tradespeople in action, studied their invoices to see how the number at the bottom managed to gain an extra zero, we learn to truly appreciate what they do. On visits to other people's homes, we find ourselves studying the ingenuity behind the construction or renovation. We admire the materials, the fittings, the workmanship, the finish. And we make judgements about the owners' budgets and taste. The other reason we read those mags is that they make us feel good: they let us indulge our desire to see materials warped, landscapes subjugated, vistas exposed – it is architectural porn.
And in those magazines, their language reverential towards architecture's sacred duties, will be snippets about non-whiteware – appliances, furniture, fixtures. The commonality of those items will be their outrageous price stickers. Who can afford $4000 for a table or $2000 for a lamp? The Dualit toaster is not particularly fast or efficient, but boy does it look good in photographs. What most of us surely wonder is, how can I get such things cheaper? Sick of paying through the nose for quality, we now fish the internet for more economical ways of doing things, drop into Ikea and Zara when overseas, shop at Bunnings as often as the supermarket. Even those of us without interior design qualifications or even, well, taste should be able to have cool homes.

Summer Houses is well-titled: Kiwis live for summer, worship at the beach, and like to be reminded of why they built that huge deck and mow the lawn religiously. This large-format softcover also reminds us that, with attention to design and materials, houses in the city and inland can be as summer-friendly as those metres from the waves. That fabled inside-outside flow is best when the heat and breezes come in and the mozzies and sandy feet stay out.

Writer Andrea Stevens(left), an Auckland architect, is clearly a fan of islands – several of the houses are on Waiheke and Great Barrier. It is a testament to good ideas, both expensive – acres of joinery, stone walls, million-dollar views – and more approachable ones. She does sometimes use words like space and palette and refers to landscape as heroic, but she lets the photos – warm, instructive images from specialist Simon Devitt – do most of the talking. You may have seen some of the houses, some of those lampshades, deck chairs, plastic dogs. But you really get a sense of how nice these houses are to spend a summer or nine in.