Down the long driveway, you’ll see it

Mary Gaudin and Matthew Arnold

$110

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Ask any architecture aficionado about their Trade Me saved searches, and this will be one: Mary Gaudin and Matthew Arnold’s celebration of modernist houses in Aotearoa is now 10 years old, and the first edition sold out almost immediately. Now, they’ve released a second edition, all 336 pages of it.

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The houses are wonderful, the writing is thoughtful and the photographs are terrific, but what makes the book special is the way they’re captured – as real houses, lived in over decades, evolving and changing as their inhabitants do. Gardens grow and timber darkens; layers of collections add richness and life. “Architectural photography likes to portray perfection but these houses are not brand new, they’re old and lived in,” writes Arnold. “But they’re perfect in the minds of the people who live in them because of what they represent, which when designed, was a better way of living.”

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Subdivision: A Longitudinal Study

Howard Greive

$75, Karaka Books

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Howard Greive has enjoyed a decades-long association with a bach community on the east coast of the Coromandel Peninsula. For six years, he documented the development of a new subdivision in the sand dunes, by turns fascinated and saddened by the conversion of farmland into streets. Now, it’s a beautiful book designed by Catherine Griffiths and Bruce Connew, including a thoughtful essay on Greive’s connection to the place over more than 60 years.

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When he presented the book at a book fair in Berlin, they asked what a subdivision was. “They had never heard of the term,” he writes. “What occurred to me is that this practice of taking farmland and converting large tracts into building plots is a peculiarly new world activity. Places that are recently colonised with relatively low population to land area and sufficiently wealthy enough people to pursue their dreams.”

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Herbst: Architecture in Context

John Walsh

$75, Massey University Press

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Lance and Nicola Herbst first started designing baches in the late 1990s with their own small bach on Aotea Great Barrier Island (see page 68). Since then, they’ve gone on to produce award-winning houses that – even as they’ve got larger and more luxurious – have managed to hang on to the spirit of the bach through the careful observation of sun and wind, ritual and habit. There is a romance to Herbst houses, wherever they are.

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Now, 12 of them have been gathered together in a beautiful book, with an introduction by John Walsh and personal notes on each project from the couple. Writes Walsh: “A house in a beautiful place should properly acknowledge its site; refuge should involve some renunciation of the regimes of normal life; habitation should bring joy. Each holiday house the Herbsts design is a candle lit on the altar of architecture to the spirit of the bach.”

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