Former Hawke's Bay farmer Malcolm Rough has just published a hardcover book called New Zealand Rustic featuring his Mahia home Te Au Homestead and five others from around the country. Photo / Kim Parkinson
Former Hawke's Bay farmer Malcolm Rough has just published a hardcover book called New Zealand Rustic featuring his Mahia home Te Au Homestead and five others from around the country. Photo / Kim Parkinson
A Mahia man’s passion project aims to inspire others by capturing the aesthetic of rustic homesteads in the coastal settlement, Gisborne and elsewhere.
Malcolm Rough has authored New Zealand Rustic, a hardcover book which will have its official launch at Muir’s Bookstore in Gisborne this Friday.
The former sheep andbeef farmer from Mahia renovated a dilapidated villa on the Hawke’s Bay coast over more than 35 years in a “style that just felt natural”.
The book showcases his home, Te Au Homestead, and five others that share an aesthetic he calls “New Zealand Rustic”. They are homes inspired by nature with a relationship to their immediate landscape.
Rough said the homes in the books were not especially styled for photography because he wanted them to be “as we live in them”.
“It is not just a pretty picture book; it gives you ideas,” he said.
The front of the book is divided into sections, including lighting, textures, colour, styling and natural light and air.
In the introduction, Coughlan writes, “a nourishing home imbues its inhabitants and guests with a sense of place and of belonging somewhere that is human in scale. These affect our deepest instincts, whether we are aware of it or not, and provide peace and a feeling of security.”
Malcolm Rough's Te Au Homestead in Mahia, Hawke's Bay is one of six houses that feature in a new book called New Zealand Rustic. Photo / Tessa Chrisp
Rough has a natural eye for a pleasing interior and is a regular at Madisons in Napier - his favourite furniture and interiors shop.
He grew up in Wellington, where his father was a landscaper and his mother a floral artist. When he and his ex-wife June bought the Mahia farm in 1989, they arrived with a toddler and a newborn.
There were two houses on the farm, a 1950s weatherboard house and a derelict 1910 villa. They chose to live in the villa as they knew it was on a better site and would one day be a better house.
Rough said it took some time to find the right houses with a rustic aesthetic to feature in the book. Three of the houses are located in the South Island: in Central Otago, Glenorchy and Marlborough.
Three others are in the North Island, including Rough’s homestead in Hawke’s Bay, one in Wainui, Gisborne, and another in Omaha, north of Auckland.
They have been beautifully captured by Chrisp with as much attention given to their surrounding landscapes as to the actual houses and interiors.
Rough said he didn’t have any plans to publish further books at this stage, but he had thoroughly enjoyed the process.
