At Home in New Zealand: Houses-History-People by Barbara Brookes (Editor)

At Home in New Zealand: Houses-History-People Paperback by Barbara Brookes (Editor)

What ideas do New Zealanders have about the places they live in? Is the house a physical structure or is it a home and a place of emotional intimacy? Is the New Zealand idea of home still a detached house, surrounded by garden flowers in the front, vegetables out back, often weatherboard with a painted corrugated iron roof?

'At Home in New Zealand: Houses, History, People' explores the idea of home, inside and out, materially, ideologically, and even morally from the mid-nineteenth century when houses were primarily a reminder of a more distant home, through to the development of state housing in the 1930s.

Architects discuss housing styles the place of the Gothic in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, modern housing in the twentieth century, women’s role in relation to modernisation. Historians assess the famous state housing scheme of the 1930s and 1940s, the place of the domestic servants (the stranger at the hearth), and the controversy over Maori housing set off by Washday at the Pa. Garden design from an anthropological perspective and a home in this world as a literary concept or the home as a welfare institution for the deserving poor.

All of these essays uncover new dimensions in the meaning of the central word home’ and the issues that notion encompasses work, pleasure, style, feeling, and even the creation of a national culture.

*Used, out of print, very good condition. Personal inscription on the interior.