Houses, homes, the building trade and quality

I’m forever amazed by the wisdom that one can find down at the local cafe. I’ve been going for fairly regular morning coffees to my local for decades now. Pro tip: if you’re in Christchurch and looking for the best non-pretentious coffee in town, check out C4 Coffee. Anyway, there are a group of individuals who I generally meet down there – we come from all walks of life and have lots of different experiences. But the one thing we have in common is that when we get together, we can sort out the world’s wrongs and put everything right again.

One of our number is a true Renaissance man. He’s able to wax poetic about the intricacies of a metropolitan bus system, the vagaries of handbuilt steel bicycle frames and, relevant to this article, all things relating to building consents and planning.

I’ve known Noel for a few years since our kids kicked around sports fields together. He’s always cheery and has always got something interesting to say. This week’s problem that he and I discussed was that of the broader building industry in New Zealand.

Having done an apprenticeship in my younger years, I got to spend lots and lots of time around building sites. I’ve also watched as over decades, my brother has built some incredible houses for very well-heeled individuals.

Over the decades I have come to understand the difference between simply building a house and actually building a home. Back in the old days, a builder would do an apprenticeship and would learn to do everything from the ground up across every part of the building. Fast forward to today and what we have is hyper-specialisation. Go to any subdivision anywhere in New Zealand and what you will see is the concrete placers come and lay the foundations, third-party frame and trust manufacturers who build the timber buts, specialist plasterers and roofers etc etc. What it means is that no one really has a holistic picture of how a house goes together.

Now the architects reading this article would tell me that that is where they come in. In their view, architects have a deep understanding of place and space and understand the overall design and build process. My counter to that would be that there is a difference between the design of a house and the construction of one. Absolutely, there’s a place in the world for architects and who doesn’t love a bit of Frank Lloyd Wright or Miles Warren? But in terms of understanding construction, that’s not an architext’s lot.

Building a house of quality, one that will last not 10 or 20 years, but 100 or 200 or 500 is a different thing to constructing a McMansion for the uninformed. We only need to look at Europe, where we see houses that are really designed with multi-generational timescales in mind. Solid materials built for warmth and comfort with double and triple glazing. Good weather protection and the like.

The old builders used to have a saying that all a house needs a good hat and boots. And while there is far more to it than those simple requirements, it’s not a bad place to start – build a house with big wide eaves to protect from rain and sun, and ensure it gets a solid foundation and you’re pretty much protected against the worst of what life throws at it.

Instead, here in New Zealand, we seem to have decided to build houses as if we were living in the Mediterranean or the American desert. Monolithic coatings with no rain protection are fine for places where it doesn’t rain but not so much for our temperate conditions. And don’t even start me on the abomination that is kiln-dried radiate pine. Yes, I know that there are 400-year-old barns in Europe built out of untreated oak. But untreated oak that has taken hundreds of years to grow and is heavy and dense is very different from plantation-grown pine that has sprouted up, like a mushroom, in only a couple of decades and is sensitive to degradation by pest and moisture.

And so, in reaction to the leaky building house scandal. we introduced a complex planning framework where today if you want to have a house built for you the building department officers will come visit you numerous times to inspect. In order to resolve the symptoms of bad design gone wrong, rather than the underlying causes, we’ve introduced expensive solutions that add time and complexity (not to mention cost and the use of hugely environmentally unfriendly materials). All things that treat symptoms, not causes. When in practicality if we just designed properties with a good hat and boots, much of this work would not be needed.

And, if I wasn’t sounding enough like a grumpy old man here’s another them that annoys me. I can’t help but comment on the fact that the building inspectors are coming out to look upon these oftentimes have very little actual building experience. Go to university. Do a degree read lots of theoretical documents about building and you’ll be fine. There’s nothing wrong with learning a theory, but theory backed with practical skills and experience is the holy grail.

We have a housing crisis and houses are both unaffordable and unattainable. We also have a societal crisis in which we all want to invest in property, which drives the price ever higher. If that wasn’t enough we all seem to desire houses that are far bigger than we actually need. Which is an inefficient use of both precious land and building materials. As a society, we need to make some changes. We need to accept that houses should and can be modest in size yet built with a longer life expectancy than currently. We need to look at the way our industry and our regulatory framework impact upon that aim.

Stop building massive McMansions with terrible design and material choices that look good initially but slowly dissolve like sodden weet-bix. Start building houses that are small and share more common spaces with their neighbours to both reduce land utilised per family, but also rebuild a strong sense of local community. And go back to basics when it comes to design, starting with solid materials and a good hat and boots.

Noel is, like myself an aging specimen and he’s more recently been suffering from the effects of a bicycle crash. But even with that impediment, Noel continues to improve with age. If only we built our houses with the same sort of traits.