Auckland Houses.

Auckland is hilly.  From any high point of suburbia you can see lots of other bits of surburbia.  Forever there are small white houses in neat rows, some look like this:

 or this:

Those came from the Internet.  Here's my favourite:

Beautiful workmanship!

There are various family relationships.  Almost all are built of white painted wood (a touch of pastel creeps into some) with 'decorative features' (fretwork, columns, twisty bits).  They are small (2 or 3 bedroom max) with minimal front gardens.  They have corrugated iron roofs (I remember an expat Kiwi telling me she was really homesick for the sound of rain on corrugated iron).  And, most notably, they are all different.  We have never seen two adjacent identical designs.

I'm talking of the suburban majority, built perhaps in the early C20.  As you move towards wealthier areas you begin to see, maybe every 20 houses, a modern design where an older house was removed.  In some cases the original house is sawed into manageable chunks, taken away on a low-loader and re-errected elsewhere.

One other aspect seems ubiquitous.  Houses aren't things, they are processes and projects. The former case is an inevitable result of building wooden houses in a semi-tropical zone. The paint peels, the wood rots and insects devour them for a start but the corollary is that the same vegetative vigour means the gardens blossom and fill as shrubs turn into trees with massive epiphytes cadging rides; giant cacti and succulent produce leathery leaves with razor sharp edges or sharks teeth or are harmless in which case they serve as homes for venomous insects.

This is a garden tree:

 


Walking down the road we stopped to chat with a man, about our age, stripped to the waist hacking at a solid mass of razor edged plants.  It was 30° and hard work. Returning a few hours later he'd cleared maybe a couple of square feet.  If he doesn't act immediately something from Little Shop of Horrors will.  It can't be a coincidence that Richard O'Brian who created Little Shop of Horrors is from NZ.

Here's a picture of a sweet little baby plant to reassure you all.

Is diddums teething?

The more, as it were, existential issue is the project.  NZ is full of active people.  If you aren't sailing, playing rugby, surfing or bungy jumping what's left? Evening classes, TV or modifying your house.  Having now watched a bit of TV, it seems the choice is between Maori music and dance (best choice), reruns of ancient UK series and films dubbed into Chinese (?).  So, extend your house into the garden, add an extra storey, create a workshop or studio.  Later you can tear bits down and change them.  How about fretwork for the soffits? Damn, time to refit the windows .... maybe new age stained glass.  It's a lifetime's work done in the knowledge that when you go, the next owner will start all over again.