A Clever Bach On A Dune, Like A Blade Of Grass In The Sun

Now, this is how a beach house should be: wet dogs and driftwood, wet towels and sand on the floor, discarded boardgames and kids – lots and lots of kids.

- Greg Dixon

It’s the school holidays and Kerry, her friend Philippa, and their combined broods of, oh, about a thousand excited primary-aged kids have just walked back from the beach to Kerry’s new Te Horo bach. They’re just in time. The sky is greywacke, Kpiti Island has vanished in cloud and the fierce westerly nearly blows the kids through the beach-side sliding door. They rush off for hot showers.

It seems the death of the great Kiwi bach may have been exaggerated. This exuberant beach house by Gerald Parsonson for Kerry, her partner Richard and their family has a playfulness and craft that's most certainly 21st century. But when it’s filled with kids and dogs, you sense the spirit of the much-loved mid-20thcentury batten-and-fibrolite bach has been reborn.

“That’s what we wanted,” says Kerry. “We wanted a bach, we didn’t want it to be fancy, we wanted it to be relaxed, laid back.”

Parsonson’s solution to his clients’ summery brief brings rare character to a coastal area, many of which have become lousy with recently built paint-by-numbers beach houses that look like they’ve been delivered directly from a city subdivision. Areas that once had character have been made suburbia by the sea for people who, paradoxically, are escaping suburbia in the city.

But what makes a bach? The late New Zealand novelist Nigel Cox, writing in New Zealand Geographic more than two decades ago, said that the classic form was rough as guts: an outdoor dunny, galvanised iron water tank, fibrolite exterior, unlined interior, exposed rafters and wiring, bare timber floors, paua shells on shelves, little piles of playing cards, a shelf of well-thumbed paperbacks. But most of all, the good old Kiwi bach was built on the cheap, and was utilitarian to its fibro soul.