An extract from Rooms Volume Two, on the New Zealanders who treat what’s trending as noise and furnish for themselves instead.
You don’t have to look too hard to realise that much in New Zealand culture is pitched at the trope of a perpetual idealised childhood. Adulting is not quite yet embedded as ‘our thing’. So be it — at least that leaves room for future growth. Except compare for a moment the future of a child brought up in the authorised (sentimental and nostalgic) version of the country, as opposed to the likely future of those who might grow up in the environments on these pages.
The creators of the rooms in this book (and its predecessor) are cultural and aesthetic outliers, a small but creative group of New Zealanders who think differently, passionately and seriously about a cumulative art and culture, and the role they play in our domestic lives. These are children, women and men who have a clear and individualised vision of how the domestic environment might look and how a home might function. Some are just starting out on their journey, while others have been perfecting these rooms for decades.
Despite appearances, most are richer in imagination than they are financially. They come from diverse backgrounds and various parts of the country. Some live in rambling rural idylls, others live in highly contained spaces within pressured cities. Some are concerned with reflecting and understanding cultural heritage, while others are about actively supporting the contemporary arts. All are, to different extents, challenging received perceptions of what it means to be at home here.
They have purposefully sought out the objects and furnishings that surround them over time. Some actively seek out items that have long passed from fashion. Others have commissioned new works. Together they find comfort, not in clutter but rather in assembly, arrangement and curation, all the time recognising that the objects being collected are not without resonance. None pays much attention to the décor and styling trends that are articulated through print or social media. What’s in, what’s out, what’s trending, are seen for what they are — noise.
Instead, many of these interiors are precisely about the elimination of contemporary distraction and the search for something more deeply nurturing and resonant, more reflective of who we might be as individuals, bound together in one place, than can possibly be represented in contemporary online fashion — they seek a place, geographical and intellectual, to call home.
Edited extract from Rooms Volume Two with photography by Jane Ussher and words by Douglas Lloyd Jenkins (Massey University Press). Available November 5.
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