KEY POINTS:
The Kiwi bach, for many of us, is a small, no-frills house for a casual, relaxed summer getaway. However, it is an increasingly rare entity these days. Renovations, redevelopment, real estate prices and council regulations have seen to that, and as a result the iconic bach could soon join the yellow-eyed penguin on the endangered species list.
The enormous price hike of prime coastal property and the attendant rates increases are the main culprits, tempting many long-time owners to cash up and move on. And who can blame them - back in the 1960s a beachfront property at Cook's Beach on the Coromandel cost 1000 and the price of building a bach on it was negligible even if you did the unthinkable and got a chippie in - as their rates back then were all of $2 an hour. Today they're selling sight unseen as soon as they come on the market. Last November a 1960s Wanaka bach sold to an Auckland investor for $1 million who had only seen the property in a photograph.
Such cash sums would have amazed the original owner/builders who never saw their modest, amateur-built seaside idyll as an investment, just a place to spend a summer pottering around and enjoying the sun and sand with family and friends. Baches were built out of whatever materials came to hand - usually from demo yards or anything spare from the "house in town" - and hauled up to site on a trailer.
They said much about Kiwi resourcefulness. Many old baches are treasured today as superb examples of vernacular architecture (in other words, - bloody interesting buildings) that say something about the culture and aspirations of their creators. Most were furnished by Mum with couches, chairs, tables and cutlery that had been deemed surplus to requirements at the main house in town. As a result, the whole interior became a living, family repository which, in many baches, traced back generations. The exterior also told a tale as extensions were added, ensuring no two baches ever looked exactly the same.
One theory has it that the bach was indirectly a response to the two world wars. Kiwi soldiers returned home with no experience of domestic life and found a degree of peace and sanity in fashioning this kind of basic shelter. They were a social leveller as well.
Auckland architect Nigel Cook has written that the "bach was created in opposition to the house in town. That had to be socially acceptable - to the neighbours, the bureaucrats, the mortgagor - but the bach only had to satisfy the family. At the bach, the clock could be abandoned and casualness prevail."
The very improvised nature of the accommodations made formality pointless and the lack of any boundary structure challenged the oft-quoted adage "good fences make good neighbours" as holiday communities sprung up and forged deep, long lasting bonds that ignored class distinctions.
Victoria University Architecture lecturer Peter Wood, who has written widely on baches, points out that the first bach settlements were essentially squatter communities that offered great opportunities for social interaction.
"Without land title there was no point in over-investing in buildings that might be removed by natural elements or unnatural authorities. This lent to the early bach areas a great sense of communal camaraderie defined by social activities. One of the most notable of these was the volunteer surf rescue clubs such as at Piha. Other examples include summer friendships, communal activities such as boating and building, and a basic levels of consideration and sharing that did not demand conventional social or physical boundaries. They were communities of trust and sharing.
"It should also be remembered that baches were a Pakeha phenomenon, and it could be said that the baching life-style offered white New Zealanders a way of living similar in social and cultural ways to a Maori value system, especially regarding attitudes toward people and the sea."
Wood believes that this "bach-lifestyle" has itself become a marketable commodity.
"I fear the bach has become a subversive status symbol. Privileged New Zealanders are prepared to enter into vast degrees of debt so that they can spend weekends and holidays wearing jandals and tending barbecues, while pretending to themselves they are ordinary down-to-earth Kiwis. The New Zealand beach in summer is a fantastic experience and should be treated as special, but I do think it dangerous to continue to rely on the bach as a relevant identity marker for our nationalism, or our architecture."
Jeremy Treadwell who lectures on architecture at Unitech - and who was involved in assessing the now-protected Rangitoto baches - also resists reading any easy cultural assumptions into the bach.
"These are old buildings which people tend to write about very nostalgically because they are associated with such happy times and a link with a very different way of life," he says, "but whenever we have a national myth or belief it's always a bit more complicated. I think the bach has said a whole lot of different things about New Zealand from the beginning of the 20th century onwards."
He suggests rather than being a form of indigenous architecture the bach was prefigured by the English and that it reflects a changing attitude towards the sea and is rooted - at least in part - in our colonial history.
"As New Zealanders we like to own the bach, but it is interesting that in late 19th century England they did develop the idea of the seaside bungalow and in Shoreham-on-Sea there were lots of little cottages that were extremely bach-like, lining the south coast of Britain. My view is that while we are very loath to admit it, the bach is important because it represents this cultural preference we have to look at the sea as an aesthetic concern. In the 19th century the sea was seen as immensely healthy and redemptive and so although we deny there is this English connection, it developed at least in part out of the way we value the idea of the sea as an aesthetic.
"Today the view of the sea has now [gained] a market value, so people are finding it very difficult to sustain the idea of a $1000 building sitting on a piece of million dollar land."
Cue the Aqua Bach which bears out Treadwell's belief but goes a step further and puts the bach on a boat, ensuring the lifestyle is once again within reach of at least the more affluent. The Aqua Bach is towable, takes 15 minutes to get on the water, is solar-powered and has a kitchen and barbecue with rotisserie on the back deck, ready for fish straight from the lake.
"What we're trying to say is you don't have to spend $500,000 to buy that waterfront bach - if you could even get one," says design manager Andy Kemp, "You buy one of these for $120,000. You don't have to leave it on the water like a houseboat where it slowly rots and deteriorates. You can pull it out each time and you can actually drive that boat right up to those million-dollar sections and enjoy the views just as much as them - in a way we're creating real estate that wasn't there!"
Kemp and his friends have taken the Aqua Bach on Lake Brunner for up to four days at a time.
"The thing we like the best is at five o'clock when everyone starts packing up their boat and we're still sitting there drinking and watching everyone go home. The lake just goes all calm and peaceful and there's nobody out there but us. You end up with the lake to yourself."
Wellington-based designers William Giesen and Cecile Bonnifait from atelierworkshop take a more confrontational and avant-garde approach to the 21st century bach.
Their Port-a-Bach design envisions the bach as a portable structure - ideal for leased land situations or circumstances where a permanent structure isn't desired - their design illustrates what a circular path the bach has taken from it's squatter origins.
"The idea of the Port-a-Bach was to create a self contained, secure yet moveable structure that answered to the idea of the bach," explains Bonnifait.
The Port-a-Bach - another prototype design - is made out of a shipping container. There's an open shower, sink and composting toilet and an interior fabric screen system so rooms can be created where needed. The couple are currently talking with investors and hope to have the concept in production in a few months.
"We wanted a product and not a full piece of architecture," says Bonnifait.
"The Port-a-Bach is a little manufactured unit that can be reproduced, unlike architecture. The concept was to have it affordable, independent and sustainable. We believe we need to look after the coastal properties of New Zealand and not concrete everything.
Cantilever is another design firm which is renewing bach traditions with a modular design - the Bachbox. This is an affordable, low-maintenance holiday home offering a roomy 126sq m with an open living/dining and kitchen, two bedrooms, one bathroom as well as a good-sized studio or guest bedroom. The prototype is actually designer Matt Brew's Hokianga holiday home.
"We work for clients who were basically building suburban houses at the beach and we were trying to get away from that," he says. "Clients were asking us for low-cost baches - basically something that was liveable, casual and affordable.
"As designers, we thought we'd better have a go at it."
The Bachbox is the result. It is constructed out of lightweight materials to allow for easy transportation and can be adapted to any site. The cost? Brew completed all the building work for under $200,000.
"It's really good to live in," he says. "It's very warm because we're getting sun all day, it's got timber floors down so you don't have to worry about wearing your gumboots inside and it does have that feeling of being a casual residence. If the wind's blowing from one side you just close that side and open the other."
And the Bachbox reflects its surroundings, literally.
"We've used a silver cladding on it. The effect is wonderful as the Bachbox ends up reflecting the sky and the water. If you look at the building from above it just blends into the water and to me silver is a natural element, which is far better than painting it a bright colour."
Be it silver, purple or camo green, reinvented as box or boat one thing seems certain - the bach will linger in our hearts and minds for many summers to come.
Just keep an open mind because the next time you see a bach it might be heading out to the coast on the back of a truck or just merrily floating down the river.
