Books
Our place
by Peter Shaw
At last we have it. Here is a large and long-awaited book that anyone with an interest in design in this country will find an indispensable reference for many years to come. Researched and written by a widely acknowledged authority on the subject, tested in many a classroom (though it is certainly not dryly academic), Douglas Lloyd Jenkins’s At Home describes the transformations of the New Zealand home, both inside and out, from its English origins in the 1900s. It concludes with those houses illustrated as finalists and winner of Home and Entertaining magazine’s 2000 Home of the Year Awards.
It is characteristic of its author’s refusal to confine himself to the merely academic that the witty cover should illustrate Rees Osborne’s 1968 photo-graph of Mrs W White of Howick waiting for her party guests in a house designed by McLachlan and Stemson and styled by Nanette Cameron.
What, among other things, gives this book its value is its constant reference to what was published in those magazines that determined the taste of New Zealand homemakers. They are all illustrated throughout the text: the Studio, Home and Building, Thursday, New Zealand Furnishings, Designscape, New Zealand Potter, New Zealand Architect, New Zealand Crafts and many more. The intersection between architecture, craft and design has never before received such extensive treatment.
Even informed readers will often find themselves surprised. Who, for instance, knows that the arts and crafts-influenced metal worker Reuben Watts, for whom Chapman Taylor designed an extraordinary house in Takapuna, found his house repossessed by the bank and was forced to resort to mending spectacles to make a living. As Lloyd Jenkins explains, Watts also took to teaching metalwork at Elam, but died at his studio bench in 1939 with a kowhaiwhai-decorated silver sugar bowl in his hands. The constant struggle to make a living in the arts in New Zealand runs like a leitmotiv throughout the book.
Lloyd Jenkins’s perceptions are often a delight. His section about Roger Walker’s 1972-74 house for Des and Lorraine Britten is a case in point. So, too, is his writing about what he cleverly calls “New Zealandinavia” – the intersection between Scandinavian design and New Zealand practice. Where else has the work of designer Michael Smythe of Furnware Products, Hastings, ever been properly treated? This was all news to me … and it’s not the only example. Lloyd Jenkins is a sleuth whose many finds will surprise readers. He does not avoid controversy either, describing the Muldoon years between 1975 and 1984 as being “responsible for the perhaps the largest creative exodus in New Zealand’s history”. The section on the impact of the 20 years of the Fletcher Challenge Ceramics Award is excoriating.
His superbly written epilogue is full of controversy, too. It is destined to inspire heated debate, particularly in its acknowledgement that the elegant shed was in fact empty and that “in the vernacular tradition there was no role in the creation of a New Zealand culture for the ‘highly suspect’ interior decorator”.
It is a pity that this deeply informative book about design should be let down by its own design. The system of colour coding on the sidebars, repeated untidily on the spine, to designate distinctions between architecture, craft and design, may be conceptually tight but is fussily unhelpful to the reader. The use of drop shadows destroys the clarity with which individual pieces of furniture and ceramics are best seen. The text is well laid out for readability; however, the placement of images is often awkward. Some are flush with the gutter or even leaping off the top of the page and as such are visually confusing. So, too, is the decision to use outlining of varying widths around photographs. Most annoying of all is the fact that photo credits are not immediately below each image, but relegated to the back of the book.
However, given the sheer scope of At Home, these are disadvantages one will become used to as the book continues to be a frequent reference – which is its undoubted
destiny.
AT HOME: A Century of New Zealand Design, by Douglas Lloyd Jenkins (Godwit, $69.95).
