KEY POINTS:
Home is where you can be yourself. Where you play and fight. Sleep and love. Entertain and hide away. Home is where you nurture things - children, gardens, your public image.
And the shape of home is changing for the middle-class Kiwi family.
Advertisers may still soften us up with golden-suffused images of three-bedroom bungalows with big backyards and rickety garages but, for more and more Kiwi families, the aspired-to abode is a four-bedroom brick-and-tile on a sliver of low-maintenance land.
Forget mowing the lawns and slaving over the garden - today's parents want to spend precious time chilling on the deck, having friends round or watching their big-screen TV.
While city sophisticates and the architectural elite see McMansions - gaudy, sterile, faux hotch-potches of borrowed styles - suburban families see hours saved, fashionable comfort and a solid investment.
You can watch the past morphing into the future in Waitakere's Henderson Heights - a name concocted by real estate agents for new subdivisions in Henderson Valley. On a weekday afternoon, the only sounds on the sweeping streets of Palm Heights and Lake Panorama are hammering, sawing and the distant snarl of a bulldozer.
A girl eyes me warily as she bikes up the steep driveway of an empty new house and spins back down. Bricks in graduated earth tones dominate, sometimes combined with wood or cladding. Grand entrances with pillars are popular while yawning double-garages stand almost sentinel. Landscaped grass banks replace front lawns, back lawns are shrunken shadows of their cricket-worthy ancestors, while decks are compulsory.
Drive a few blocks, and you're in Keith Hay home territory - the unreconstructed tie-dye and leopard-skin west Auckland of Outrageous Fortune.
Sandra Wilson, branch manager of Harcourts Henderson Heights, says the area's on the up.
"Four years ago, $420,000 would buy you a top-of-the-line, brand new four-bedroom home. Now we have houses in the high six hundreds."
The modern middle-to-upper class wish-list: "People are wanting low-maintenance, three or four bedrooms, en suites, two living areas. It doesn't have to be a large section but outside entertainment is paramount."
Nationally, the trend is for fewer people living in houses with more bedrooms but smaller sections. In 1986, says Statistics New Zealand, the average household size was 2.9 people, 52 per cent of homes had three bedrooms while 16 per cent had four, and the average floor area was 125.6sq m.
Twenty years later, the average household size was 2.7, 44 per cent of homes had three bedrooms, 21 per cent had four, and the average floor area was around 126sq m. And the proportion of homes with six-bedrooms almost doubled since 1986.
A big section nowadays is 800sq m - four-fifths of the quarter acre (1020sq m) that became the middle-class standard in post-War New Zealand. Brian Lukacs, owner of the New Lynn branch of international real-estate giant Remax, predicts traditional three-bedroom homes with big backyards will soon vanish from certain areas of Auckland.
Already the Henderson Heights-style home is creeping in from the city fringes as developers outbid families to snatch up big sections to build a brick-and-tile or apartments on the back lawn while owners subdivide.
"Within 20 years there'll be very few older-style bungalows left around New Lynn. The ones left will be occupied by elderly people or passed down through families. You'll see more high-rises." He puts it all down to pressure on land and the modern appetite for ease of living.
He's come close to slicing up his own massive 2000sq m Titirangi property, but decided to hold onto the land. "It's a shame people do cut up their properties."
Penny Cliffin, Unitec landscape and architecture programme director, explains the weatherboard bungalow of pavlova paradise fame, known as Californian bungalows, dates back to the early 1900s, but really caught on in the 1950s, popularised by Hollywood movies and television programs.
"Bewitched comes to mind: big glass doors, the women in their dresses and the men in their suits, that picture perfect look."
Then came the era of prefabs - Keith Hay and Neil Housing module homes, built in pine because the villas and bungalows had used up all the native timber.
Despite the trend towards smaller sections, Cliffon says Kiwis still like their gardens - except now they're happier to pay someone else to do the weeding.
And there are protections against a wholescale modern McMansionisation of our cities, she says. Councils apply restrictions to buildings that meet heritage criteria, such as the ubiquitous late Victorian villas of Auckland's inner suburbs - the McMansions of their day. (But there are limits to the limits - the December demolitions of Remuera's Coolangatta homestead and the historic Jean Batten building on Queen Street drew outrage from heritage buffs.)
More practical constraints include the cost of stormwater systems and the need for grassy spaces to absorb rainfall.
And the traditional Kiwi home still has its fans. Says a recent Auckland convert to the big backyard, "It wasn't something we really comprehended until we had our son: how important a commodity space is".
- HERALD ON SUNDAY
