KEY POINTS:
When renowned Auckland architect Pip Cheshire set out to write a large glossy book about baches, he reached for the ground rather than the sky.
Cheshire, a teacher, architectural judge and enthusiastic proponent of his profession, searched for the elements of the real Kiwi bach, scouting the country
for what he considered were essential aspects of these buildings.
Most of the places he visited were relatively unsophisticated; baches were not what might be seen as "the high point of architectural cuisine".
These second houses, baches, cribs and holiday homes he toured with photographer Patrick Reynolds didn't glint with style and glamour and scoop architectural awards. They were more likely to have spots for cleaning fish or dozing in the afternoon sun.
The result is Architecture Uncooked - the New Zealand holiday house through an architect's eye (Random House NZ, $90). It is in the shops from November 14 but will be launched two days earlier at an Auckland beach-front barbecue.
The baches featured in this book have old water tanks and mismatched chairs, instructions scribbled on walls in almost illegible handwriting, skis lined up in a porch and tyre swings hanging from pohutukawa above the sand.
This 254-page collection of buildings is as incongruous as the furniture inside. One almost windowless bach in the middle of a clearing has corrugated iron cladding and bunks knocked up from the forest.
Norfolk Island pines appear in profile. Small parties of people crowd around old dinner tables with the sea as their backdrop, with low lighting showing the pleasure on their faces. Wire netting encloses decks.
Fireplaces have blackened facades. Books and an old stereo system are squeezed into ramshackle shelves above a single bed. Children's faces appear tacked on to old walls, grinning in faded pink patina, forever holding up their catches for a camera which clicked many years ago.
In Reynolds' world, cabbage trees appear as sculptured works of art in profile against the sky, with a stack of timber behind. The swollen neck of a nikau is pictured in the slatted shade of a structure, but not its leafy foliage.
Kitchen cupboards appear as artistic still life.
These photographs and Cheshire's words make one enduringly simple statement: that the extraordinary can be found in the ordinary.
Dramatic pictures appear, too, but again for effect and to tell a story. Power piles line up like soldiers standing in front of the Southern Alps smothered with snow.
Cheshire does not shy away from describing vividly what our baches are like. He celebrates the musty smell these places sometimes give off when opened up. He writes of how old curtains are brittle and shut until occupants return.
Chapters often begin with a description of Cheshire making his way to a bach by crossing farmland or taking a path near a beach, viewing the scenes with "my now northern-city eyes".
He writes of descending down to bays or alongside rivers, climbing over wire fences or stiles before entering baches which often lie at the water's edge. He describes how a bach is positioned on its site, how far it sits below sand dunes or how high up a hill.
The point is not who owns the bach - because owners are not identified in this book - but what it says about us, how the deck relates to the interior, what purpose the structure serves, what feeling you get from the bach, what it offers.
The text and Reynolds' artful photographs are interspersed with Cheshire's rough sketches which serve to heighten the love this architect shows for our landscape and the buildings it has produced.
FLASH HOMES TAKE SOME FLAK
A note of disdain against flash holiday homes is sounded in Architecture Uncooked, says David Mitchell of Mitchell and Stout Architects.
Author/architect Pip Cheshire is clearly making a stand against highly sophisticated holiday homes, Mitchell said, in favour of the basic Kiwi bach.
"This is a very fond recollection of holiday homes and evocative of holiday environments that I would think were under threat.
There's a note of anxiety in the text about the business of taking the whole baggage away with you when you go on holiday. That's how it's become," he said citing houses in Omaha, Whitianga and Tauranga.
"If you are going to go away to this alternative house, you should live a different way and each of the cases taken in the book shows that quite vividly," Mitchell said.
Architects were often being asked to design houses for the country or beachfront which were much flasher than the owners' houses in the cities, he said.
The beauty of the new book was that it celebrated the nostalgia which offers a nail on the back of the door as the coat-hook rather than the walk-in wardrobe.
Mitchell also praised Cheshire's sketches, saying they were friendly yet pointed and made a clear statement with a simple few lines.
Mitchell said Patrick Reynolds' photographs were perfectly understated and unpretentious, allowing the readers to reach their own conclusions.