Out in the open

Open home charity tours are a great opportunity to be a nosy neighbour. Photo / Steven McNicholl

House and garden tours have long been great money-spinners for schools and charities. It seems we have an insatiable appetite for peeking into the lives of others. And generous home owners are readily persuaded to open their private spaces for the sake of a good cause.

A few years ago I went on a St Cuthbert's College tour of homes in Remuera and surrounding suburbs. The properties were so uniformly fabulous, so lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous, it was almost depressing. I telephoned my lawyer husband on the way home and told him he needed to get a paper-round (extra income, you see) if we were ever to have a chance of living in a mega-mansion of our own.

But most tours feature a comforting mixture of homes; sure, some are fancy but the majority are quite understated. Many of the most inspiring houses are frankly ordinary but elevated to interesting thanks to the care and attention lavished on their furnishings, artwork and general interior decoration. And that was how I found close to1600 people trooping through my own far-from-fancy home earlier this year. Of course, when I agreed to it being part of a fundraising tour I'd had no idea of the numbers involved and nearly fainted on the day, on learning exactly how many tickets had been sold.

Opening up my own home was a revealing experience. By 9.45am there were about 150 people queued up at the gate. My house was number eight in a tour of 11 Auckland houses and gardens - and, having been given complimentary tickets to the tour (presumably to get me out of my own house for the day), I dutifully visited the rest of the properties that were open. Then, just because I could, I chose to tour my own home as a visitor, showing my wristband to the door-minder to gain admittance.

It was so strange seeing clusters of people crowded in every room of my usually calm and orderly house. Perhaps the most surprising thing was unavoidably eavesdropping on people's usually oh-so-wrong speculations to their companions about the house's inhabitants. Upon spying a Matthew Williams photograph of a rural scene on a wall in our TV room, a woman said, "They're from the country, you know." We're not. Then, upstairs in my office another woman, having seen a photograph of my husband, was heard saying, "His wife's an artist, you know." I'm not.

Some of the remarks however were much more insightful. Someone looking out over our rear garden said, "It's a real family backyard". That, I feel, was a polite way of saying, "It's a bit rundown." It was true and since then our geriatric swimming pool and surrounding deck have been replaced.

My favourite overheard comment though came from an elderly gentleman in one of our bedrooms who said, "They've spent as much money on decorating this house as it would have cost them to buy it." Some people could have taken this as an insult or an accusation of rampant overcapitalisation. But I chose a more optimistic interpretation: that the 12 years I spent painstakingly planning and executing a well considered and, hopefully, thoroughly appropriate interior scheme for each room were not in vain.

There's a standard list of etiquettes that must be observed when on house and garden tours: remove your shoes; don't touch anything; don't pick any flowers or take any cuttings; no food, drink or children.

But may I suggest one more cardinal rule? That is, save any comments about the property and its owners until you've left the premises; you never know who might be standing beside you.