Canvas asked three New Zealand writers and a film-maker to bring their world to us - and they gave us the view from their room. Tess McClure, in New York; Laurence Larson, Taipei; Sarah Quigley, in Berlin; and - closer to home - Florian Habicht, in Kawakawa.
New York, Tess McClure
I decided to take this room when I saw the window. You could see it in the background of the listing photos, behind some stacked boxes: enormous, overlooking the street, a sill big enough to sit on. The window opens out on to St Nicholas Ave in Sugar Hill, one of Harlem's historic districts, a neighbourhood named for the sweetness of life uptown. "Have you dug the spill, Of Sugar Hill?" Langston Hughes wrote back in 1942. If I put my forehead up to the glass, I can see up the block to the ex-fried chicken shop, Jimmy's, where Malcolm X and Charlie Parker used to wash dishes. The building is old and the frame is fitted poorly enough that I feel a slight breeze whenever I lie down. In the summer, people set up on the corner and let off fireworks all night. In this cold February, three snowfalls in, the ice is piled into unmelting blackened piles between the cars.
The room is long and narrow - it fits a double bed, just, rammed up against the wall. The desk where I write this slots neatly between the edge of the bed and the doorway. When I arrived here, I was studying, broke, and accrued furniture slowly and haphazardly. The desk was the first proper piece of new furniture I bought, about a year into working. Behind me is a solid wood side table with drawers, legs chewed by a previous owner's dog, so heavy I thought I was going to faint hauling it up the stairs of my old apartment. A rocking chair, taken on the subway from a party in Queens. A bookshelf from someone's apartment in midtown. I had to wave cash in front of two Uber drivers before someone would try to put it in the boot.
A basket hanging on the door holds my supplies for going outside: keys, a medical mask, then a cloth mask to wrap over the top. Fur hat for the cold, with ear-flaps to flatten the sides of the mask, gloves for contaminated surfaces. Every time I leave I layer them all on. Coming home I peel off each piece carefully, concentrating, trying to ensure I don't touch anything: keys away first, then phone down. Lift the hat from the peak, place it in the basket. Pull off the gloves, taking care not to touch the outside. Take mask one, then two by the ear straps. Throw away the disposable mask, retain the fabric. Wash hands. Smear a squirt of hand sanitiser over the phone. Sometimes I feel like a vacuum-packaged piece of food - at that moment when you pierce the plastic and it inflates, peeling upward, letting in the air.
Most weeks, I look up the latest datasets from New York State, which break down the pandemic into sets of numbers: new cases, new deaths, hospitalisations, overall test positivity rate. You can click through the map to see those numbers by neighbourhood. In the Harlem postcode where I live, the positivity rate passed 9 per cent at the end of January and held through February - almost one in every 10 people lining up for a test comes back positive. On the street, I try to give people a wide berth, skirting around the man who sells bunches of chrysanthemums and carnations at the corner, the cluster of people outside Dunkin' Donuts waiting for a bus. New York is freezing in February, so occasionally you can see someone's breath, suspended in the air in front of them. When I have to pass someone who's maskless, I sometimes hold my breath, so the rhythm of walking changes: breathe, hold, take a few steps, breathe out. I think about bits of a Daniel Halpern poem, that he wrote eight years before Covid. "There are fewer introductions / In plague years," it starts. Breathing is "Willed now, slow — / Well, just cautious / In inhabited air / ... a new squirreling of air space / A new sense of boundary."
Isolation is a strange luxury - a basically hideous experience, packaged up with knowledge of your extreme good luck to have the option of isolating at all. I stopped my last occasional visits to shops after the new variants arrived in the city, when the national death toll was still approaching 400,000. When I took this apartment last year, I'd looked at the big bay windows and imagined the parties we'd have in front of them when things were normal again, thinking that might be a few months off. Now, all of my social encounters are regulated and intentional - Zoom rooms scheduled ahead of time, real-world gatherings carefully planned for parks or rooftops. There are no accidental encounters, chance meetings, no randomness. People have been worrying for years about 'filter bubbles' - the way online algorithms narrow our lives and conversations until we have only our own thinking reflected back to us. Now, offline, it occurs to me that I don't really remember the last time I had a conversation with a stranger. There's a line from Stalin's Epigram, cited by Masha Gessen in her essay on loneliness and its consequences: "We live without feeling the country beneath us, our speech at 10 paces inaudible". In this small room above the street, the public sphere sometimes seems to crumble away. It's hard to keep your sense of the city outside.
On a zoom call, I talk to a friend who recently left New York. "How are you liking San Fran?" I ask her. She says it's fine - not so different to New York, since both locations leave you marooned inside an apartment. "It's kind of like living nowhere, right now." Sometimes, this is how my room feels too: like living in a detached 100sq ft pod, rather than a city, a room that could be anywhere, or nowhere, but happens to be in New York.
Other nights, the place still feels unmistakable. There is a man who plays the trombone on the street at night, a little way from my window. His main tune is When the Saints Go Marching In, which he usually plays haltingly, several times over, before moving on. Sometimes he starts at 10 pm, sometimes 1am, keeping me awake. I am always glad to hear him.
Tess McClure is a New Zealand journalist, who has just returned from living in New York. She is now a correspondent for The Guardian.
Taipei, Laurence Larson
I shouldn't be here. In this stitched-together studio apartment with its two fridges (one works) and no kitchen; six walk-up floors above a drum-happy temple and a bustling night market, where the smell of Taiwan's acquired-taste stinky tofu wafts up the stairwell. I shouldn't be in Taiwan at all.
But these are Covid times and what was my temporary Taipei refuge – between a January 2020 summer holiday in Auckland with family and friends and an apartment in Beijing I couldn't return to – has become home, music studio and artist's loft, all wrapped into one rumpty, sprawling space.
Most days here see me sitting or standing at a big, adjustable Ikea desk working on song arrangements, recording vocals when the background market mayhem quietens down. My Kiwi-Taiwanese girlfriend Chia – and fellow Covid refugee – is an Auckland Uni business graduate whose plans to hit Melbourne by storm were grounded by the pandemic. Instead, she joined me in Taipei last June with her camera and paints. Month by month, our room has filled up with her photographs and paintings, along with the Taiwanese indoor plants we discovered don't much like the indoors. There's always music playing, art projects scattered over the wooden floors, LED lights looping around the high ceilings, with various music and design projects flickering across the computer screens. In this space, we recently put together an entire album production for a Taiwanese pop star, with me writing and producing the songs and Chia designing the album cover and organising the release plan. It gets messy sometimes but everything's at our fingertips: cameras, wires, lights, stands and speakers are piled up in every corner. Two large wooden wardrobes I couldn't convince the landlord to let go of, only just held together by their remaining nails, now stand where the extra bed once sat, stacked and wedged between boxes, bags and guitar cases.
Living above the night market I like to think was my first deep dive into Taiwanese culture. And it turns out not having a kitchen isn't much of a problem. There are hundreds of "bang-for-your-buck" food choices right at our doorstep: papaya milkshakes, sweet potato balls, beef noodle soup, Japanese-style octopus pancakes, hotpots, along with all sorts of braised marinated meats and vegetables. We're friends with many of the stall-holders now, even getting a few discounts from our favourite spots.
The room does come with drawbacks: on the sixth floor we're far enough away from the cockroaches but the bustling sounds of the crowds, BB-gun balloon-shooting and pinball night-market games, along with one particularly vocal, soup-flogging auntie, make for a background cacophony until midnight most nights. Good thing I'm a night owl.
In March last year, after a few weeks on a Taiwanese business partner's couch, I had to start flat-hunting and figure out how to move my household goods – remotely – from Beijing to Taipei. This is a densely populated city with apartment space at a premium. And I had no idea where to look. I scoured the university area in Gongguan, the flashier Songshan area, peppered with cafes and boutique clothing stores. I went to the edges of the red-light district with its colourful characters wandering about as sake bars opened up shop in the late afternoon. It was midday when I followed a lead to Taipei's famous night market, Raohe Street, with an impressive Mazu temple dominating the entrance. At the address, a small doorway and the six flights led me to the shared washing machine and water dispenser that sits outside the top-floor outer door. My landlord-to-be gaped at the 1.94m foreigner who she'd been speaking to on the phone in Mandarin just minutes earlier.
It was nice walking into a room with high ceilings; many of my previous apartment visits required me to bend over to get through the door frames. And not only did it have height, it was surprisingly roomy, having been two small apartments knocked into one space. There was a simple computer desk up against the wall, with a small study table in the middle of a big, empty room, which flowed into the space still occupied by the two fridges, a sofa and an enormous CRT television. When turned on, the TV produces noises similar to that of a dog whistle for humans. Besides this, there was a bathroom, rather run-down, but with a sit-on toilet (always a bonus). I signed up without question.
Now this space feels like us; it also reflects something of the city - a mixture of tech, nature, art and street party – all wrapped within our worn-out but well lived-in building.
Laurence Larson is a New Zealand writer and musician, fluent in Mandarin. Between singing (in Mandarin) and regular TV show appearances he also writes for other pop singers and TV dramas throughout Asia.
Berlin, Sarah Quigley
When I first saw the apartment, I wasn't sure I liked it. I was moving not from choice but from necessity. Trudging up four flights of stairs – scratched brown lino, dull beige walls – I realised this would be the 40th time I'd moved house. I didn't feel very positive.
Inside, the light was good and there was a huge tree out the back, blazing orange in the autumn sunlight. But the rooms felt blank. They hung back, giving me nothing. In true Berlin style, the previous tenant had stripped out everything, including the light fittings. The only thing he'd left was a charred spot on the bedroom floor, presumably from falling asleep while smoking.
I walked around under the dangling cables, my footsteps booming. I needed to love this place. It was a miracle I'd even got a showing, in this central neighbourhood, in this particular street. For two decades Berlin had been a renter's paradise – before the property investors had swooped in and start-ups had taken over prime residential space.
The janitor stood in the hallway, chewing gum, looking at his watch. "Zehn Minuten," he said. If I didn't find something to love in the next 10 minutes, the apartment would be put online, at which point (if the statistics were to be believed) 120 people would be queuing outside, references and bribe money in hand.
I gazed at the wavy 1950s window panes, the plumbing that criss-crossed the bathroom ceiling like the engine room in a ship, the rattling gas boiler. Cute oddities that normally I'd like. Yet they sparked nothing in me. I couldn't imagine living here.
Then I spied a door in the corner of the main room: pink frosted glass, wobbly brass handle. A storage cupboard? Not expecting much, I opened it – and there I found a balcony.
A beautiful alcove balcony, like a private room, with a glorious view over treetops to the gracious old brick building opposite, and above that masses of blue sky. At that moment, the apartment opened up like a flower. "I'll take it," I said.
It had been neglected, this balcony. It was like a scruffy old dog that had been living on the street and needed a lot of care. The first weekend there, on a grey November afternoon, I scrubbed the pebbled concrete once, twice, then three times. The water ran black, washing away the soot of decades. The wide ledge overlooking the street was covered in bottle tops full of cigarette butts. With blue fingers, I scraped off layers of grime and pried away the tendrils of dead ivy. Two big windows in the kitchen looked onto the balcony but when I went to open them, I found they'd been painted shut. I set to work with a chisel.
Finally, it was done. Clean, empty, and ready to be made not just liveable but beautiful. I bought an olive tree, a symbol of new beginnings from old roots, and decorated it with fairy lights. They twinkled through the long frosty nights and dark dawns, and I waited for spring.
As the world woke up from its winter sleep, my friend Tom's cabaret theatre closed down. "We're selling off the furnishings," he said. "Do you want a table?" He lugged it up 75 stairs to my door, through the living room and out on to the balcony. With its round salmon-pink marble top and its wrought iron legs, it looked incongruously perfect. It was just the right size for a laptop, a coffee pot and a large cat. Now he had a great space for sleeping and I had a great space where I could write. We spent long summer afternoons out there, shielded from the slanting sun by a massive beach umbrella.
Five years on, as I knew it would be, the balcony is the heart of the apartment. When I open the kitchen windows in the morning and look out on fragrant basil, mint and lavender, I feel as if I have a tiny garden four floors above the busy street. On summer evenings, it's the perfect spot for tapas and wine with friends. At 4am, I sit wrapped in a blanket and watch for shooting stars.
Balconies are precious spaces in big cities. They give you privacy and shelter, while also giving you the feeling that you're one small part of a living organism. During the long anxious months of lockdown, more people than ever have been using their balconies: for sitting and chatting, for working, for smoking, for hanging out their washing, for exercising or just for cloud-gazing and dreaming of freedom. The Berlin balconies are like a big theatre with lots of small stages, where we play out our different daily lives.
Sarah Quigley is a writer novelist, critic, non-fiction writer, poet, and columnist based in Berlin.
Kawakawa, Florian Habicht
With all the different threads that make up my life, even though I live in Auckland, Northland is my heart and home. I moved to Northland in the 80s with my parents and younger brother Sebastian. I couldn't speak much English and can remember people asking me "if I was on holiday". I heard this phrase so often and thought that "holiday" must be the country where I am from.
As an adult, I'm a workaholic. I can't go on holiday without editing a film on my laptop or scribbling film ideas into a notebook. Having said that, my life feels like a holiday because I'm so lucky to be able to do what I love, full time. Life and art are the same thing for me, and that is why the room I have chosen for this story is the living room of my new film subjects: Isey and James Cross.
This room represents Northland for me at the moment. It's the room where I first met 99-year-old Isey, when she appeared with her son James in an Instant Kiwi TV Commercial. I directed the ad as I was struggling financially with my film-making and little did I know that this living room would soon play such an important part in my life.
When I first stepped into the room, I could feel the sun shining inside. The room has been lovingly designed and decorated by James Cross, adorned with curiosities and treasures, like a museum. Every photograph, carving and flag collected is filled with memories and meaning. Photos of loved ones and tupuna who are with them in spirit. A lot of the pieces reflect heritage, roots and have sentimental or reflect cultural heritage and blood lines. There's a black baseball cap with the word "Ngāpuhi" written on the front in the AC/DC font. Even the couch is an artwork with all of its pillows and blankets. Their room is a work of art.
A month or so after shooting the ad, I was in this room the second Isey turned 100. I also tried to sleep on the couch that night and my 2m height made me have to curve my long legs.
Hanging from the ceiling is the Tino Rangatiratanga flag. One of it's designers is Linda Munn. Isey is her grandmother. Another flag on one of the windows used as a curtain is Hundertwasser's Koru flag for Aotearoa. I learned that Isey used to sometimes go sailing on Hundertwasser's boat, Regentag, in the 80s. I also knew Hundertwasser as a teenager, when the Austrian-Kiwi artist would come to our house in Paihia for my mum's Austrian cooking. Frederick loved my mum's Wiener sausages. My dad asked Hundertwasser to bless some of my early drawings, and he did, writing a note on the back of the art saying: "Florian, I wish you all the best with your artistic career." And signing it.
Like the treasures and curiosities in James and Isey's living room, we all have memorable stories that make our life. These stories can usually only be remembered when they are triggered by something, and having a room full of triggers is a wonderful thing.
When I lie in bed in Auckland and there's light, I can see a framed B&W photograph on the ceiling of a nude woman on a rooftop in London. It's a photo my father Frank took during the 60s. If my father didn't take this photograph, my brother and I wouldn't be born - or at least we wouldn't have the same mother. The model was a good friend of my dad's and she and her boyfriend had planned a New Year's party for the week ahead. When her partner saw the photos my dad took, he became so jealous that he cancelled the party, and my dad was forced to find another New Year's Eve event to attend. And this is where he met my mother Christine.
Servus/Arohanui,
Florian Habicht's documentary, James & Isey, is in cinemas nationwide from May 6
