An A-frame house in Bellville, Texas, 1960. Photo / Getty Images
Can you remember your very first house? Kim Knight, first, on a childhood home that was always a work in progress, and Greg Bruce on returning to the place where he thought he had superpowers.
Nobody else lived in a triangle house. A giant capital letter of a house. Literally, an A-frame.
It was two-storeyed, but we were never allowed upstairs. Too dangerous. Unfinished. When my parents bought this house it was still a fibreglass factory. They had a vision, but mostly I remember the concrete floors were blobbed with resin and some of the walls didn't reach the roof.
A-frames are the houses people write books about. Architect R.M. Schindler is credited with designing the first contemporary version, built in 1934, in California. The style took off after World War II, during what architectural historian Chad Randl called the era of "second everything". Extra televisions, bathrooms and, inevitably, houses.
Think of this house as a fancy tent. A cabin in the woods; a picture-perfect hut in the European snow. The triangle house was a 1970s style icon decades before anyone posed at the front door with a cream polo neck and an Instagram hashtag.
The house at 105 Redwood St was not a "second". It was my parent's first mortgage; the first home I clearly remember. We'd lived in Air Force accommodation but now I was 5 years old and my dad was a civilian sheet metal engineer. Other people's houses were fully formed with marigold borders. Ours was a work in progress.
I spent a good deal of time looking forward to the day my family would ascend to the pinnacle of home-ownership and have upstairs bedrooms. Downstairs, at the almost finished back of the house, the kitchen and living room were the same thing. Our television was in a cupboard behind a curtain in case the inspectors visited and asked to see our licence (an actual thing until 1999 - I once had a flatmate who hid our television in an unplugged fridge to avoid a broadcasting fee).
The lounge suite was black vinyl with yellow cushions, the kitchen table was Formica, extendable for crowds and birthday parties where I had, in no particular order, the carousel cake, the butterfly cake and the pretty doll cake. If the other kids noticed that the first room beyond the front door was, basically, a building site, I don't remember.
Our suburban tent had a grand entrance. A wide strip of grey gravel that crunched when you wore shoes and bruised your bare feet when you didn't. I walked to school because it was close, though I was often afraid. It was rumoured that some of the Standard Four kids carried knives to stab other children on their way home. But it was Blenheim, 1975. I suspect the greatest risk was sunburn.
My sister and I shared a bedroom that was long and narrow. No paint or wallpaper but two Fimo plaques featuring our favourite Wombles (Tobermory and Orinoco) and a poster of The Virginian I bought with my own pocket money. Power cords were threaded through holes cut in the plasterboard walls. At the right angle, I could see right through to the living room and my aunty on the sofa with her boyfriend. They were not watching the television.
In a half-finished house, everybody's business is everybody's business. The radio was always on. One morning in 1977, I lay in bed listening in on the news and my parents talking and felt sad that the King was Dead even though I was confused because didn't New Zealand have a Queen?
The end of my bed butted against the sloping wall of the A-frame roof. The weird thing about our weird house was that the inside didn't always match the outside. In the living room, everything had been squared-off. Straight and seemly lines underneath that flamboyant cladding.
Our A-frame had been built by the late Nelson North, founder of Norski Laboratories. If you've ever gone to the loo at a backcountry hut, you'll know his work - the Norski Fibreglass Wilderness Toilet is an architectural classic. In the 1970s, his company repaired skis. The A-frame referenced an alpine aesthetic and, my dad suspects, the unconventional geometry appealed to an innovator. Sometimes I thought our house was cool, but mostly it was just where we lived. The walls held my family.
We stayed at 105 Redwood St for four years. My sister and I went back once, in our 40s, as pretend buyers at an open home. Someone had finished the upstairs bedrooms and laid down proper carpet. Our home had become a house but all the lace curtains in the world couldn't save it.
In 2011, my childhood home was bought by an electricity distribution company. They knocked it down and replaced it with a bland and beige building filled with power transformers and switchgear. A low suburban fence. Neat topiary hedges. The local newspaper reported on the transformation: "The substation has been designed to look like a house, including landscaping, to fit into the neighbourhood."
Kim Knight
We moved out when I was 11, wildly popular at school, immediate past house leader of Weka, sports captain, laden with friends, thick with academic and athletic achievements. We moved to a place in which I quickly became widely hated, condemned, beaten up, insulted, left behind and diminished.
Contained within my first home had been everything good about me, and all my power. A year later I went back inside, legally, with my mother and our old neighbour, and I was upended and dizzied by its wrongly arranged furniture and incorrect smell. A home is a feeling made physical and I could feel my old self in every room, rushing around, childlike and helpless, trying to find his way back to me. He needed my help but I had nothing to offer him - I had been diminished. He will remain there, I assume forever, along with all his childish hope and happiness.
In the lounge, I had watched MacGyver and The Goodies and Night Court and at least one Telethon. In the end bedroom I had read Adrian Mole and Treasure Island and Every Boy's New Handbook, with its detailed information on semaphore and the Beaufort scale. In the smaller bedroom across the hall, I had woken regularly from nightmares involving wolves, desperate to run to my parents' room less than a metre away but paralysed by my fear of wolves. In the toilet, the CFC-laden air freshener on the window ledge behind me, I had first read of the hole in the ozone layer, in Reader's Digest. On a sunny winter's afternoon, age 8 or 9, I had let myself in after school and read about the first Olympic gymnast to achieve a perfect 10, Nadia Comaneci. I clearly remember the smell of the book. It smelled like Elton John's hit song Nikita, which was playing on the radio at the time.
Why do these memories stay with me when years-worth of presumably more important and interesting memories are no longer available? Good question. A home, like a life, is a repository of mysteries.
Aged 3 or 4, I had walked out of the upstairs ranchslider, before we'd built the deck, and had fallen several metres into the sandpit below. I have a clear memory of lying sprawled there on the yellow tarpaulin, terrified by the spider crawling alongside me. It's almost certain my memory of this incident is not my own but is instead constructed entirely of my parents' retellings.
I can clearly remember the first Christmas I can remember, waking up to a full stocking next to my bed and asking Mum why someone had given me so many nice things, thinking there must be some mistake. Again, this memory is almost certainly not my own and now I think about it, is probably not even real.
The ceiling was sparkling asbestos, the curtains orange. There was a black potbelly stove in the corner of the lounge, immediately behind the brown La-Z-Boy where I used to sit on Dad's lap and watch TV every night. The front door was yellow frosted glass and the back door was clear frosted glass. No one ever used the front door and, for a long time, I struggled to understand how and why our house was backwards. The back stairs were plain concrete until we painted them beige shortly before moving out. There was what we called a "barbecue area" below the deck but I can't remember it ever being used.
In that house, we got our first microwave and first VHS, which, in their clearly-bounded functionality, were humanity's last truly great technologies. The microwave never helped elect an autocrat; the VHS never threatened to subjugate us as a species. The advancement of technology, like the moving of homes, insofar as it is a marker of the passing of time, makes increasingly clear to you as a person that you belong to the past. The essences of the things that exist in a home - physical, human, spiritual - are condemned to remain there. We move on, but who is "we" and what is it made of?
Our new house was three times bigger, in a nicer area, had views of Rangitoto, two bathrooms, a walk-in wardrobe and a breakfast bar. While living in that house, I passed School C and Bursary, entered university and moved through life as expected and demanded. I was bullied out of rugby, became increasingly bad at cricket, failed at drama and debating, and eventually found the only dream I had left was journalism, which I knew would offer stability, if nothing else.
Greg Bruce
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