There is something lovely about the first house George Clarke visits in Homes in the Wild – not just what it is, but what it isn’t. Which is to say, it’s something other than an elegant modernist shed.
The tented house – a striking tensile fabric structure designed by Greg Noble, an architect better known for neo-classical homes in leafy suburbs – looks out to the Pacific from the far side of Aotea Great Barrier Island. It’s a rugged place to be.
“It’s one of the most unusual houses I’ve filmed anywhere, never mind just in New Zealand,” says Clarke on a Zoom call from a bland Manchester hotel room.
“I think it was quite a revolutionary piece of architecture. It also had to withstand the elements. Particularly somewhere like Great Barrier, which can get battered by some terrible weather coming in on that coastline. Building a canvas tensile structure in that location was a pretty brave thing to do.”
In the first episode of Homes in the Wild, Simon, the owner, is unruffled when Clarke suggests it must be scary inside in a storm. “It’s fun,” he shrugs. “We have plenty of board games.”
It’s a good set-up for the themes of the series, which sees the Amazing Spaces host visit Great Barrier, Rākino and Kawau islands in the Hauraki Gulf, the Marlborough Sounds and Australia’s Lord Howe and Bruny Islands in search of homes that respond to remote environments. But “remote”, he agrees, is a relative term. Whereas Lord Howe is a volcanic remnant 600km out in the Tasman, the Gulf islands are on Auckland’s doorstep.
“When I speak to people about Rākino and Kawau, people will go, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve heard of that, but I’ve never been,’” says Clarke. “And they’re not far from the city at all. In some ways, that’s kind of hats-off to New Zealand, because you’ve got that much beauty. If you’ve got somewhere gorgeous five minutes down the road, why are you even gonna travel two hours to go to a fairly remote island?”
Clarke is no stranger to New Zealand. His visit to make the show in February and March was his fifth time here (by contrast, he had never been to Australia before) and he’s a champ at posting glowing reviews of us on his social media.
“But when you get onto a boat or a plane and physically cross water to go to a smaller, more humble place, it’s just got a completely different feel to it. You feel like you’re on a different planet. That’s what makes this series unique. Yes, there’s the logistics of how you build there, live off-grid and do all of that stuff. But the feeling of what it means to be on an island, you’ve got to meet people to do that. You’ve got to engage with the communities to understand it.
“I’ve got to be careful that I shouldn’t be negative about my other programmes, but this one feels quite epic. It feels like a proper travelogue.
“Making this series tapped into parts of many other different series that I’ve made, but collectively, it feels very different. You know, I went off to see turtles and wildlife. Well, I don’t do that. I know nothing about wildlife, to be honest with you. I’m an architect. So that was great.
“And then I would just meet people socially. I went to the boat club on Kawau Island. It’s like the only building that anyone can hang out in, because there’s nothing else there. And I would just turn up and chat to people and have a beer and just, you know, what’s island life like?”
On Great Barrier, he sits down with Orla Cumisky, the Irish-born owner of the world’s only solar-powered Irish pub (the home connection is that it’s in the oldest house on the island).
I shouldn’t be negative about my other programmes, but this one feels quite epic. It feels like a proper travelogue.
He also surfaces some social history when he meets Roger O’Shannessy, who came to the island in 1972 as part of a generation of New Zealanders who wanted to live collectively on the land – and, unusually, actually stuck it out, teaching himself to build by constructing his own circular-themed house.
“Do you know what he said to me? He says, ‘I don’t know why you’ve come to film my house, because there’s nothing really special about it.’ And I’m like, ‘Roger, what are you talking about? It’s fantastic. I bloody love it! The fact that you’ve built this little circular drum and then you’ve extended it to give you a bigger living room and then give your kids a bedroom, and then you’ve extended it again. This piece of architecture represents your life from being in your early 20s to still tinkering with it now. And that, for me, is really beautiful.’”
Clarke says he also “hung out for days” with Rodney Ngawaka, one of the trustees of the island’s Kawa Marae.
He had done his prep – two cultural courses before he left the UK and another one on landing in Auckland, but the marae visit, he says, “was such an education for me. Because in some ways the architecture, the main community building that we see, is quite humble, but the symbolism behind it and the connection with landscape was mind-boggling. You know, when Rodney’s talked me through it, I was like, I didn’t realise half of this.
“It’s very simple but very meaningful and steeped in symbolism and that connection to landscape and nature. You know, we talk about that a lot in the architectural world today, but, my god, Māori have been doing this for many, many years. I really genuinely wish we had done more on that.”
Clarke, as intellectually curious as he is cheerful, starts scribbling down the names of contemporary Māori architects to look up later.
“If I’m lucky enough to make a second series, if New Zealand would want me to come back, I’d love to do more of that and maybe we should speak to those architects and see some of their projects. I’d love it.”
If George Clarke has his way, it seems we’re definitely up for visit No 6.
George Clarke’s Homes in the Wild, Sky Open, Thursdays from August 14, 8.30pm. Streaming on Neon
