Phil Spencer; love him, and this list of house shows - Wyn Drabble

Phil Spencer and Kirstie Allsop's house shows are must-watch for Wyn Drabble and NZ's "best" also make for fascinating viewing - even if they are not actually the top echelon.

Wyn Drabble is a teacher of English, writer, public speaker and musician. He is based in Hawke’s Bay.

I am a great fan of Phil Spencer (and Kirstie Allsop); Love it or List it and Location Location Location are about as regular as TV viewing gets for me.

So the six episodes in the current second series of New Zealand’s Best Houses will have me on the sofa every time but I do have one minor quibble and it’s about nomenclature.

By all means you can call me a picky old pedant but I feel the word “best” doesn’t actually fit what the programme is doing, I don’t feel that the ranking is quite that judgmental or pretentious.

The show is really a presentation of a selection of rather snappy and expensive homes but I accept that “A Selection of Houses that Phil Spencer Likes and Probably Cost the Owners Quite a Few Millions so Would be out of the Question for the Average Punter Like You so Don’t Even Think About it” is clumsy and lacks pop as a title.

If you own a house with a fireplace as big as a bus or a kitchen-living area as big as the Canterbury Plains, you could well be featured on the show.

I just took a break from writing this to watch a Love it or List it (now there’s a title) and would like to digress for a moment and make a couple of comments about Kirstie and Phil’s British shows before coming back to Phil’s Kiwi one.

The first is a response to the oft-heard comment when the viewing couple look out a window: “Look at that view!” My standard response tends to be, “In New Zealand we just call that ‘outside’.”

The second comment is about British garage use. Of course my view is purely anecdotal and I am not at all ashamed to admit that I haven’t tried to back it up with any statistical data.

From my viewing I have made the assumption that British garage use is different from ours. Homeowners seem to park their cars outside in the two off-street car spaces squeezed between the footpath and the front wall of the house.

This leaves the double garage free for bicycles, kayaks, leaf blowers, hammers, jars of screws, timber off-cuts, hinges, camping equipment, fishing tackle, back issues of Country Life magazine, discarded birdcages, back-up toilet paper supplies, a broken concrete garden gnome, and countless cardboard cartons full of … well … stuff!

In Phil’s current Kiwi oeuvre, I admit the views are a little more than just “outside”; they include snow-capped mountain ranges, turquoise lakes, white-sand beaches and I feel sure that in upcoming episodes we will see the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Or at least Torquay! When we say views, we mean views!

And the garages may house bicycles and kayaks but there’s also room to squeeze in a Porsche and a modestly-priced family saloon for supermarket shopping. After all, many of the houses are just baches for the summer!

If he comes back again, Phil should bring Kirstie and the two of them could take things down a financial peg or two. I could show them some real and far more affordable Kiwi baches with views to die for.

Or maybe they could focus their search entirely on tiny houses but, on second thoughts, that’s probably encroaching on the territory of George Clarke.

Whatever happens, if Phil and Kirstie do both come, we can put them up for a night or two to help their budget but there won’t be a butler’s pantry or walk-in ‘robes. It certainly won’t be in the “best” category.

In fact, it would be a tent out on the lawn. But we’d bring out a thermos of tea. On the house.