WHIMSICAL MUSIC Two men from wildly different worlds join forces to explore the NZ home on a road trip in a 1960s Mark 2 Jag. 5.35 here on The Source. 'I'm Goran Paladin.' This is renowned architect Ken Crosson. Ken's going to show me his world ` Has somebody taken the rest of the house away? a world where I know nothing... He must've been smokin' something crazy. ...and he knows,... Concrete, timber, galvanised steel. ...well, nearly everything. Don't get it. Expose him to culture, creativity and style. It's just another case of us stealing something from overseas, isn't it? Who knows? He might actually learn something. Were you not listening? No. I have a tendency of doing that. Maybe we will find a NZ home. Is that a challenge? And I'm up for the challenge. Yeah, cheers, Ken. Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2016 RELAXED MUSIC Goran, I thought a trip to Napier would do us both good. Well, you're not a bad bloke after all. Ah, truth be told, you're all right. Now, let's recap. What have we seen? We saw the evolution of villa into a transitional villa. Then how the bungalow took over. And we saw arts and crafts. Nothing like what I did at primary school, though. Oh, and, uh, that genius idea of moving the plumbing inside. That's right. A huge change in our homes over a very short time. But what's next? Tonight, our journey takes us from stucco... Stucco! ...to state, as we look at a taste for art deco,... This is deco in Auckland. ...the rebirth of state housing... It was a quarter-acre section ` the foundation of NZ life. ...and how that impacts on our homes today. In 1931, Napier was devastated by a magnitude-7.8 earthquake, a quake that lasted two and a half minutes. I can't imagine what that would be like ` the earth shaking for two and a half minutes. The Victorian and Edwardian buildings of Napier had no way of coping with that, and avalanches of brick and mortar crushed cars and people alike. Within minutes, almost the whole city was ablaze, a fire that took a day and a half to extinguish. The inner city was flattened and many houses close to the city completely destroyed. That sounds like a disaster on a mammoth scale. It was. But from that disaster came the opportunity to design a city in a unified way, and this created an incredible snapshot in time. A whole city was about to be rebuilt in a 1930s style. This is architect Marshall Cook's home in Auckland. He successfully blended his modern home into a heritage area, although not under the same pressures as 1930s Napier. The reconstruction committee was up and running literally before the last bricks fell. It was not long after the Santa Barbara earthquake, and a few of the architects from Hawke's Bay had been to Santa Barbara. There was a general consensus that they would do something in that Spanish mission style. And of course the lovely thing was that they put all the architects together in one building, and they sat and worked together day and night. But all of these people had no staff to get the drawings out, but it happened to coincide with the first year of architectural graduates from the University of Auckland Architectural School. And so this group of graduates came down, and they joined the local architects, so they immediately had a workforce. It was immediately game on to create a new city, and although many of the wooden homes fared better than the inner city, whole suburbs needed to be rebuilt. A new home style for NZ emerged, as the fashion for Spanish-influenced American architecture got a local twist. I've heard a lot about this art deco style of building. What is the quintessential art deco home? What does it look like? What are the features? Well, art deco was a huge departure from the arts-and-craft-inspired houses that we'd seen before, and it was a really really pared back architecture. Essentially, white walls and no roof element. It was really confronting, in a way. So a flat roof? Flat roof. Basically a series of lean-tos out the back. It was an architecture of walls, in some ways. The sorta speckled outside, ya know, the exterior. The stucco. Stucco! Marewa is the Maori word meaning raised up, and that's exactly what happened to the land here in 1931. As a result, Marewa stands as the best example in NZ of an art deco suburb. Whare-Koa. > What does that mean? I just told ya. Oh, yeah, House of Koa. Were you not listening? No, I have a tendency of doing that. This is Arthur and Mari's family home and has been for 40 years. Gidday, Arthur. How are ya, Ken? 'Although the inside's been remodelled to suit their lifestyle, 'the outside remains as a great example of the art deco style.' What's the name of the house? GORAN AND KEN: Whare-Koa. Whare-Koa. What does Whare-Koa mean? Well, whare is house or home. Right. And koa? KEN AND ARTHUR: Happy. Happy. Whare-Koa ` happy house. Uh, what better could we explain? This house is whare koa. Yeah. I'll have your plate, Mousie, and I'll pass mine over to this other young man. Thank you very much. We'll share. It's like breaking bread, isn't it? Yeah. Oh, yum. Mm. I like the sweet things in life. (LAUGHS) > Don't we all? Don't we all? > Must want some tea. CHUCKLING BIRDS CHIRP I'm intrigued by deco, which your house is a classic example of. Were you drawn to that when you selected this house? When I first met this young lady, I was a bachelor and lived the life of Riley and had a great time, and, uh, I got told in no uncertain terms, 'If you want to celebrate our life together, I want a house.' And I thought to myself, 'Now, where am I gonna get a house from?' You know? In the meantime, you know what it's like when you're tender in love ` you want to... You wanna please that person. You wanna nest up, you see? I said, 'Well, let's not muck around.' I said, 'We'll just get a flat, and we'll get together, and we'll` we'll have a great time.' She goes, 'No, I want a house.' Blimey. And I didn't get any joy that week, I can tell you. LAUGHTER So then I picked out five houses, and, uh` I had about four to look at. Yes. And you moved into this house? Yes. Not that we actually were aware that it was classic art deco. Well, it's got everything we really want. It's got a big yard. I always like a big yard. I don't like the children playing out in the street or anything, and, uh, they wanted a room each, and that was about it. I didn't have very many requirements. (CHUCKLES) PEACEFUL MUSIC What about the look of it? I mean, it's got a really interesting facade, the solid plaster look, no eaves, the very sheer front. It's very engaging, I think. Well, that's probably because you've got architectural background. I was just an accountant. Numbers and figures ` how much is it? What's the mortgage? How close is it to the pub? I'm sold. LAUGHTER Let's get in there immediately. More or less, yeah. LAUGHTER We have come to perhaps respect and admire the house for what it actually stands for in the community as a whole. So that came later? Yes. Oh, yes. That really came later. This was just our home, and that was the number one priority. I had my family ` my wife, my three children, the cat ` and let's get on with life. I think it's created an anchor point. It's your base, isn't it? It's home. This is home. Yeah. > Just home. I think when we eventually have to leave here, it will be with some sadness. Mm. > With some sadness. RELAXED MUSIC Arthur and Mari, they were a bit of a riot, weren't they? They were a great couple. The funniest thing of the lot is that they didn't realise what they'd moved into. The style of the home had nothing to do with them moving in. During the 1930s, art deco was the height of fashion and everybody wanted to do it. It fell off. And then now, it's fashionable again. Although the term art deco didn't appear in our language until the 1960s, the style was adopted all over the country. In our biggest city, it was the trendy well-to-do who built these homes. And I've got a good one to show you here in Auckland. Unlike Arthur and Mari, Karen knew exactly what she was buying. Hello, Karen. Nice to see you again. Hi. 'She's taken that knowledge and run with it, 'enhancing the deco look with furnishings and fittings from the era.' Thanks. Thanks for having us. Thank you. This is deco. This is deco in Auckland. Yeah. Fascinating. A lot of people would wanna bring their house into the 21st century and make alterations, but you've actually gone back and stayed true to the art deco values. Yeah. I've pretty much kept it the same way as when I bought it. Spent quite a lot of time searching Trade Me or junk shops, and we put in the lights and the furniture. I've always had a thing for old furniture. I don't like buying brand new stuff. And the fireplaces ` they're original? Yes, they are. Cos they're classic deco. And that ties in with the outside as well, which is very authentic. Can we have a look upstairs? Yeah, most certainly. Thank you. So this is one of the upstairs bedrooms. Great deco door handle. What kind of view have you got our there, Ken? Goran, you can see the world from here, man. Jeez, I can see everything. And from this vantage point, I can see the grand total of one other art deco house. Yeah, but I think that's what happened. You know, unlike Napier, where there was a wholesale rebuild, this was just the odd pepper pot within the suburb. Ken, I noticed that the balcony has this curvature to it. That's a theme, isn't it, in the art deco home? Yeah. Whether it's a bow, bay window or whether it was part of a wall that ducked away. Used to be called the Streamline style. It was very much a machine-age aesthetic. You must be just rattling around inside this big old bird. No, I've converted it to a bed and breakfast, so I just have people coming and going all the time. Bringing people out West Auckland is always good. Yeah. West is best. You don't live out West. I do. Ponsonby. (CHUCKLES) West of Queen Street. LAUGHTER But there were storm clouds on the horizon. Would necessity trump style as we headed into the Great Depression? With no houses being built, you began to get a chronic housing crisis. 1 The Great Depression stands as the most shattering economic experience ever recorded. Still feeling very much like a colony, NZers found themselves in living conditions they thought they'd escaped. Mm. History repeating. But I remember we were the social laboratory in the 1900s. But the social laboratory had been dismantled, and NZ was totally unprepared for the extreme hardship that was to come. There was no unemployment benefit, and relief schemes were set up to help farmers, whose net income went from zero into the minus in the early '30s. This was the era of the Great Depression, and our economy wasn't really immune to the effects of the rest of the world. Yeah. We would've relied really heavily on our wool and meat exports. What happened to those industries? Well, they were really devastated, and, unfortunately, we didn't have a plan B. By the mid-1930s, with the effects of the depression still everywhere, NZ elected its first Labour government. Amongst a raft of new laws that were the birth of our welfare state, the government looked once again at the growing problem of slum housing in our cities. And just like in 1905, the solution was state houses. But this time, they intended to get it right, providing jobs as well as housing by ensuring the homes were built by local companies, using local materials. This is the path to Ben Schrader's place. He wrote the book on state housing in NZ. What are you puffing so hard for? Keep up. I'm doin' all right. Gidday, Ben. Nice to see you again. Oh, hi, Ken. Good to see you again. Ben, this is Goran. Goran, Ben. Hey, really nice to meet you. Likewise, Ben. How are ya? Yeah, really good. Come on in. Excellent. Thank you. After you, Ken. Ben, it's a bit of a hike up the stairs. How do you find those? When we moved in here, I thought, 'How can I handle all those steps?' But it's amazing ` you get used to them really quickly, and now I whip down in the morning and pick up and paper and don't think anything of it. At the top of the hill, we're confronted by this big door and a big wall. Is that the way the house was originally? No. What happened is that the original part of the house was the box. In 1948 it was built. Our children were sorta growing up, and there was no room to swing a cat. And so we added on one box and another box, and this is the living room which is the new part of the house. To take advantage of that amazing view out there. Yeah. In fact, I often sit on the window seat there and just look at our million-dollar view, and then when the fog comes in, we call it our $1 view. LAUGHTER Ben's an historian and author. The emergence of NZ state homes has fascinated him. It really began in the 1920s, when there was a suburban boom. The state encouraged people to move out from the inner city into the suburbs. But when the 1920s depression at the end of the decade came, building stopped, and with no houses being built, you began to get a chronic housing crisis. When the Labour Government came in in 1936, they came up with a state housing programme, where the state would build 5000 houses and solve the whole housing crisis. Mm. And what was the quality of these state homes? Well, the whole idea was to raise the bar of housing. There'd been great concerns since the early 20th century about slum-like conditions. They wanted to clear those slums and move those people into improved conditions. So for people that had been living in those congested areas, it was amazing. These were architecturally designed. They were designed in the English cottage style, which was extremely fashionable. There was an electric stove, there was electric hot water, they had an internal toilet, at least two or three bedrooms. And there's a nice story of one Christchurch woman moving into her house in Papanui. She didn't move out for about two weeks, because she was so enraptured about the conditions` She didn't go outside? Well, she didn't leave the house, apparently, goes the myth, cos she was so excited about, you know, having all these new mod cons. So it was certainly a great step up. It's probably one of the things that's most identified when people are thinking about NZ housing. He's a well-known economic commentator now, but Brian Easton grew up amongst the mod cons of the state house. Actually, the whole of my childhood was in state houses, but we moved as the family got bigger. The one I remember best is one down in Christchurch. The people on our right, there were five kids; the people on our left had four kids. It reflected a good chunk of urban NZ. Hang on a minute. This doesn't sound like the stigmatised last-resort housing people might think of today. No, it wasn't. These were homes people were proud to live in, and from a system that had the best interests of people at heart. We had the land, we had the materials, the demand for housing. And we had the workers. We just brought them together to build houses in a very pragmatic response. Historically, it was a quarter-acre section ` the foundation of NZ life. And you had the spuds out the back and the chicken coop out the back and was very active in growing things. You know, there wasn't any Wattie's selling you peas in those days. A few state homes around here. Yeah. So these are state homes of the late '30s, '40s. And that was a time that typified that English cottage style. And the government of the day built suburbs, in fact, of state housing. Back in the '30s, '40s and '50s, state houses were aspirational, and they were seen as stepping stones for workers, essentially. Nowadays, they're seen as housing as a last resort. This little state house has become a monument to the system. In the 1950s, the National Government of the day sold the house to its original tenants. But when they died in the early '80s, the house was sold back to the state because of its immense social significance. This is where it all began. The first state house built by the Labour Government in 1937. Yeah, and you know what, it does look like an old English cottage. Well, that was the style of the day. Come and let's meet Winnie. Winnie has raised her family in this home. Yes, come in. Thanks, Winnie. Winnie, this is Goran. Winnie, lovely to meet you. Nice to meet you. How are you? Good, thank you. Can we come in and have a look at your pictures? Yes, yes, come in. Thank you. 'Even inside, it's a shrine to the state housing scheme.' There's Helen Clark. Tell us about that picture up there. Helen Clark, she came over and make a birthday for this place, 60 and 70. Yes, yes. Because this is very important house, isn't it? Yes, yes. She invite 400 people. (LAUGHS) All inside here? Yeah. And TV ONE. And people, they play music outside. You'll be looking forward to the next one? You'll be here for the 100. We'll have a big party. LAUGHTER Interesting, isn't it, how the spaces are quite small ` you know, that English cottage style ` and the house itself is quite small? It might be small for you. This is about the size of my standard room in my house, OK, so... Well, yours is a state house. Everyone's different, Ken. Yours is a state house. Everyone's different. Yeah, exactly. 24 years living in here. Long time. But I'm happy over here. I'm happy where I am. I'm glad people like Winnie get a home to live in. And it's an interesting forerunner to my own home. But here in the 21st century, we're once again trying to get state housing right. Good design, good materials, good ideals. It's the vision of Glen Sowry, the head of Housing NZ. State housing, as part of a broader social housing sector, continues to evolve and adapt, and this development in Tamaki is a great example. This site did have two three-bedroom properties on it. It now has 11 new homes. Four of them are four-bedroom, three are three-bedroom, and four are two-bedroom and designed and configured very carefully so that you create a little micro-community, and that's really the way we need to move forward. Now, these properties need to be architecturally designed, uh, because if we just chuck some boxes in, it's not gonna work. We're a long-term owner. We're not a developer that just builds something and flicks it on and it becomes the concern of the owner in years to come if it fails. We care deeply about the performance of these properties over decades. Back in 1939, the world was teetering on the edge of another disaster. How did world war affect our homes this time around? Still, you know, this is very much the south side. 1 So, we just got through the Great Depression, but things were about to get a lot worse. How were they gonna get worse, Ken? End of the '30s, England declares war on Germany again. Ah, yeah. World War II. Of course, of course. And we sent our guys, which seems like a ridiculous notion. We're little old NZ down the bottom of the world, and we get ourselves involved in a European war. Back then, England was the most important country to us. As Michael Joseph Savage says, 'Where she goes, we go. Where she stands, we stand.' It was a war we were duty-bound to be part of, but the impact on an emerging nation was profound. Just like in the First World War, NZers served and died under the NZ flag. And once again, when they came home, it was with a stronger sense of national identity. The little immigrant nation was coming of age. That's right. And as the memory of war faded, NZ homes were about to undergo their most radical shake-up ever. Immigrant architects with ideas that would've seemed crazy in pre-war NZ were designing homes with authority and flair. One of the great immigrant architects of the time was Ernst Plischke, an outspoken advocate of the new way of living. He lectured and published his views widely. The post-war modern home was about as far away from the boring English bungalow as you could get ` open and flowing on the inside, interesting and sculptural on the outside. These houses were designed to be lived in. Now we're talking. Although, it sounds like the first true Kiwi homes were designed by recent immigrants. A little ironic. MAJESTIC MUSIC Tucked away in the Wadestown bush in Wellington is a superb example of the modernist style. Interesting the modernist view on the house, isn't it? Yeah. But I like the design ` it's sleek and sexy. (KNOCKS AT DOOR) Alistair's a fellow architect, so he knows what a treasure he owns. These houses attract those sorts of people. How are you? Good. Alistair, this is Goran. Stepping down into a little garden room. The interior garden kind of a classic of Plischke Firth architects. Extraordinary space, isn't it? Look at all this built-in furniture. I actually bothered to count, and I got to over 200 cupboards and drawers in the house and then gave up! (LAUGHS) Well, that's what they did. They used to put all their stuff away. We shifted from 90m2 into 210m2, and we had to sell furniture to shift here. Just didn't need it? We didn't need the furniture we had. This is a built-in stereo system, which is piped through to the kitchen and study. So way ahead of his time. Yes, way ahead of his time. PEACEFUL MUSIC The next space is the dining room, which could be shut down from the rest of the house. Sliding door here, which sounds like an earthquake. And then you pull the curtain through here. And suddenly you're in a almost cave-like environment, and very intimate and formal dinners were held in here. Come on through to the kitchen. Wow, this is pretty original. Look at this ` the old Formica bench. Yeah, with a very big upstand. What about this? This is the original sewing table. So the sewing machine would've been here, and this would've had the, uh, bobbins, and the sewing machine would've slotted in here. I see heaps more storage. So the feature of the house continues. Fascinating little spot down here. Yes. This is the built-in breakfast table. We actually, literally, can live as an entire family in this room. So we can be on the computer, the girls can be on the laptop, Sharon and I can be cooking. Problem being in here, though, you're disconnected from the sun and the view out that side. Yes, yes. And I guess that's a feature too of these houses ` they were beginning to connect to the sun and the view, but still, you know, this is very much the south side. UPBEAT MUSIC So, this is the children's bedroom, which is a stunningly clever little space. Our oldest daughter sleeps here, our youngest sleeps over there, and they have a strong sense of their own space. It's actually three rooms in one ` two bedrooms, a play area ` with a really small footprint. Yep. Plus, the built-in writing desk, the built-in bookshelves, the built-in beds. They're now 15 and 13. Neither of them have expressed any desire for a separate bedroom. MELLOW MUSIC This is the main bedroom ` bedroom one. Not called the master bedroom any more. No, no. For very good reasons. Interesting with this room is that there is only one light` installed light, which is over in that corner. There are no ceiling lights at all. And the other interesting thing is the French doors that open out on to the roof. I like that. So you can go out on to the roof with your beanbag. It's incredibly private. Alistair, why's it so important to you that you don't change features of the house? We're interested in the authenticity of it, and we also believe ourselves to be guardians of the house as it was, which was entrusted to us when we bought the house. So we live with doors that don't open properly and things that break and bust. But the hell with it. We're keeping it. I'm liking this era ` sleek on the outside, plenty of room on the inside, a real sense that someone's thought hard about how the home might be lived in. But it's imported people and imported ideas. Where's the Kiwi twist? There's that curve, Goran. Supposedly the first curved house constructed here. Extraordinary, isn't it? 1 There's a famous quote that describes the modernist look ` form follows function. In other words, how you use something should dictate what it look like. Yep, that's a big turnaround right there. And in the hills overlooking Auckland, there's a great example of that thinking. We're in Titirangi. We're going to visit a house that was designed in 1947 by Tibor Donner. Sounds like a good Kiwi bloke. Tibor Donner grew up in Hungary but learnt his architecture here. He was Auckland's city architect. He's responsible for many iconic structures in the city ` the Parnell Pools, the Auckland City Administration Building, the Massey Memorial on Bastion Point. But he also did some fantastic residential ones. This is his own home. Wow. Do my eyes deceive me, or is that, like, curved? That is a curve. Very unusual for the time. I haven't seen that before, Ken. The holes in the soffit? Yeah. They're pretty unusual. I reckon Paul will have a view on that. Gidday, Paul. Gidday, Ken. Good to see you again. Come on in. Paul ` Goran. 'Paul's another fellow architect.' Welcome to the Donner House. Thank you. Recognising its importance, he's read up on the history of this wonderful home. There's that curve, Goran. Supposedly the first curved house constructed here as a residential. Extraordinary, isn't it? You know, it's actually almost got its arms around the view, embracing the view. MAJESTIC MUSIC Paul, fabulous little model. You can see the little holes in the soffit. Yeah, what's that about, Paul? Well, I think that it's to depressurise the front of the house in the massive wind that we get up here. I mean, you've got a house that's higher than the viewing decks at the Sky Tower. And did you know it was Donner's house when you bought it? No. No. It's amazing, isn't it? (CHUCKLES) You're an architect, Paul. CHUCKLING So` So embarrassing. It's one of those pivotal houses. LAUGHTER Do you remember being taught Donner? Yep. You do? You may have been away that day. Paul's having a long lunch, and you're learning all about Donner. LAUGHTER How long did he live in here, Paul? He bought the property '46, I think. Until '93. So they died here. It was 1998 when I got it. And then how long did it take before you had to roll your sleeves up and start doing some reno? The day I arrived, mate. Yeah. (CHUCKLES) I'm serious. It's been a journey right from the get-go. I mean, I couldn't see it for what it actually was because of the state that it was in. It hadn't been looked after? Oh, not at all. I mean, every single part of the paintwork was now lifting off. Massive big potato chips all off the building. The water damage was colossal. The entire thing leaked from top to bottom. And then dry rot, and everything was red lead. Oh my God, I can remember nights up on the roof. Um, you know, it'd be half past 2 in the morning. So I did the part where got it over the hill and stopped it getting ruined. At some stage, I'm gonna have to say enough's enough here. Obviously, you need someone maintaining it 'forever'. Because that's what we actually did here. We got this place heritage listed. So the exterior is fixed in time forever. Forever in a building terms is, like` that's a lot of work. Do you believe this Donner House is a version of the NZ home? It's not your typical NZ home, by any stretch of the imagination. It's just so weird and different. It's like living in a piece of art, really. These are the coolest of things to get hold of now. These are collector's items, right. So the whole '50s modernist restoration and preservation of these buildings is really important. There's not many of these houses left. They're just getting munted every other day. Very seldom do you actually own a house that's designed by the architect for himself. So this is the doozy of them all. It's the only one of its kind. Big time. Suburbs were growing further away from the cities where people worked, and this, along with the Kiwi desire for freedom to live and go wherever and whenever they wanted, drove the ever-increasing demand for the motorcar. It's unclear which shaped what, but there's no doubt that NZ's sprawling cities and rudimentary public transport gave people little other option than to travel by car. Can't really see myself travelling any other way. It's the freedom thing. It's as Kiwi as fush and chups on the beach on a sunny Friday. We all had this idea that, you know, it was best to live in the suburbs, lots of green around us, and Dad can go off to work, Mum can stay in the suburbs and look after the kids. But where's the Kiwi home, the comfortable, homely Kiwi home? It was only after we'd bought the house and moved in that we found out about it being a Vernon Brown house. 1 As the shadow of depression and world war lifted, NZ prospered. Once again, Mother England, ravaged by war, needed our produce. Low unemployment and a positive view of the world all made us proud to call ourselves NZers. And that sense of identity was increasingly showing up in our homes. In Auckland, one architect's head stuck out above the rest. His name was Vernon Brown, and his ideas were all about NZ. As a senior lecturer at Auckland's School of Architecture, his philosophy and teaching influenced a whole generation of architects. Architects like a young Roger Walker. I was lucky enough in my first year at Auckland University in the late '60s when I went through to have Vernon Brown as a tutor. I remember Vernon going round with his hand behind his back, and all the student work for the year was on the walls. And he would comment. You know, he had a pipe. And he'd say, 'Who did this?' You know. And one nervous fellow put up his finger. Vernon turned and said` This is in front of, like, 100 students. He said, 'Have you considered accountancy or perhaps law?' (CHUCKLES) He was probably the original pioneer of domestic architecture in NZ. You have to acknowledge that. He said, 'Why are we building little tiny rooms like they do in England?' You know. And they do little tiny rooms in England because of the cost of heating each room. You know. And whereas, the NZ climate, you can open everything. So history will eventually acknowledge those houses. Man, big vision. Big vision but simple ideas. So why have you brought us here, Ken? This is a very important house in the story of the NZ home. It's rare to find an untouched Vernon Brown home. Most of them have been extensively modernised, to the point where they're almost unrecognisable. Tania lucked in here, and she had no idea what she and her husband were buying. Initially, it was the size of the backyard. It really appealed to my husband, who grew up in a rural environment. The house had been vacant for 18 months. You'd come in from the street, and it was just bushes and shrubs and long grass. So you couldn't really see it. You didn't know about its heritage? Not at the time, no. The house was sort of secondary at that time. A Vernon Brown house secondary. Tania. LAUGHTER Oh, well, don't take offence. Not everybody knows about architecture. It was only after we'd bought the house and moved in that we found out about it being a Vernon Brown house. And how did that make you feel, that you had a unique slice of NZ architecture? We already thought we had a really cool house. As a couple, fantastic place to live. We wouldn't have changed anything. But since we've had a child, it's just not big enough, that's all. If it was bigger, we wouldn't need to do anything. So it's interesting that you can actually have a house that was designed in the middle of last century, and it appropriate now for our lifestyles. Good design. Good design doesn't date. No. So what are some of the features of the Vernon Brown home that make it unique? He fashioned an architecture that was very reflective of the timber buildings in Scandinavia and some of the timber buildings and our sheds and rural buildings. He started raking ceilings and having spaces that were higher and lower and contrasting spaces. Yeah, as we can see here, ceiling level here and then the angle in the lounge. This is about the dining space being a more intimate space, the enjoyment of food. So it was a smaller space, and you're concentrated around the table. And as you move into the living room, it was about open, connected to the outside, the garden, and a little bit more lofty. RELAXED MUSIC Vernon Brown also changed the materials, so we've got a very rustic look in the lounge, and a more sophisticated feeling in here, with the painted surfaces. And interesting that that cabinetry between the kitchen and the dining space. So this was an era where women were slowly being brought into domestic life ` the mother wasn't necessarily out the back. As we close out the era, it makes sense to look at what was seen at the time as the perfect solution to the need for inner-city homes ` a social experiment on a grand scale, increasing population density in an attractive and forward-thinking way. That sounds like the sort of thinking we need right now. We're hooking up with Labour's housing spokesperson, Phil Twyford, to look at a style of home his predecessors created. Thanks for coming down here again, Phil. I brought Goran here, because this is an extraordinary example of state houses in NZ. These were designed in 1938, built in 1940. They look super modern for something that old. Yeah. This is the first Labour government really trying to lift the quality of urban housing. Housing for single people, a lot of these flats. And you can see the quality of the design. It is. It was an era where we were thinking a lot more about people, about community. PEACEFUL MUSIC Who knew that state housing and housing for ordinary people could be so well designed and look so stylish? Do you need to take a breather? I just turned my pacemaker off. I love this little building down here. Yeah, so, what is that? So that originally was designed as the community building. It's a space that people get together. So around the outside, a series of low-level, single-bedroom apartments and stacked up the back here, two- and three-bedrooms. So many of the elements of this are exactly what current designers and architects are trying to achieve. They've got some community, they've got nice open space, good design. Privacy. Combinations of units so you don't get just the one group of people in a complex. And there was a tram route that finished just outside the front gate. Well, that's perfect, isn't it? That density of housing on your public transport routes ` exactly what we were talking about today. Is that a NZ first ` having the tram just pull up outside the house? I'd be careful with that political reference there. Phil's from Labour. (LAUGHS) Oh. (CHUCKLES) Sorry. I apologise. It just came out. This is the way a lot of European cities develop ` intensity of housing on the public transport routes. Oh, OK. I see what's going on here. It's just another case of us stealing something from overseas, isn't it? Perhaps there's some ideas here from our papakainga, where Maori communities used to wrap around communal spaces. And maybe the little decks and overhangs are like those early whares as well. So we are actually blending overseas and indigenous architecture. Apartment living ` I can see the attraction, and I'm impressed with the style and innovation that was going on all those years ago. But I'm still glad I've got my own home. And now at least I know where my home came from. Tough times, eh? The era of the Great Depression and the Second World War. Yeah, so finances are tough, people are living how they have to live as opposed to how they want to, and that is being reflected in the homes they're living in. But also we're being influenced by the architectural movements of, in particular, the modernists in Europe and Scandinavian design. Yeah. Do you think we'll get to a point where people are borrowing from us, you know? Well, maybe that's just part of our journey, Goran. What do you mean? Well, where are you going? Are you gonna tell me about it or what? I'm the 'now' generation. I want answers now. Don't leave me here.