SHADY PAST

Douglas Lloyd Jenkins says it’s time to reclaim the porch

It probably comes as no surprise that on a recent holiday in America I spent a lot of my time visiting house museums. We have too few in New Zealand and those we have are worthy rather than inspiring. It’s sad because visitor numbers to house museums grow every year, as do the things individuals take away from their visit. House museums are, of course, great for decorating and architectural ideas. It’s also a fun opportunity to critique the taste of those long gone – insane egoist, dowdy middle-class spinster or stylish bachelor. It allows you, too, to get an idea of what it would be like to live a different sort of life, or to live yours a little differently. One of the things I came away with from this trip – influenced perhaps by searing summer temperatures on America’s Eastern Seaboard – was a new interest in cool spaces. I have long been a fan of a dark room, particularly in older houses which often have south-facing rooms that no cheering coat of paint is ever going to make warm and light-filled. With a little imagination, these rooms – so often simply written off as cold and dark – can make great spaces for night-time occupancy. What I realised in the older houses of New York and Boston was the importance of having somewhere cool in which to retreat from the heat and bright summer light during the day – without having to take to the bed for a lie down. The most magnificent example of this occurred in the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston. Built in the Venetian palazzo style, it was opened to the public on her death. It’s a house, but a house on a magnificent scale, built around an interior garden courtyard – itself one of the most famous architectural spaces of its type. Once she’d lived in the house for a while, Gardner had the ground floor remodelled to create a cool open-sided summer room, neither in the garden nor in the house but looking both in and out. (She, being very rich, also hung there the biggest John Singer Sargent painting I’ve ever seen, but that’s another story.) A perfect in-between space, the room was heavenly because it combined summer shade with visual stimulation. Generally, New Zealanders are big on sunshine and on getting sun into their houses. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing like a sunny room but there are moments, many through summer, when you just want to put some distance between yourself and bright light and heat. What tends to happen with the more modern houses – those built over the last 40 years – is that we have let the sunshine in with bigger and bigger windows that capture views and allow light to flood in. We control this light with window treatments or window architecture of increasing complexity. What’s worse, we’ve become a nation of ‘air-conditioners’ in which heat pumps sprout from walls like bunions. Outside we wear sunglasses and shelter under sun umbrellas on light-eviscerated decks that we have built out from the back end of our houses until we reached – the sun. The strange thing is that if you look at New Zealand houses built before the 1970s, most have a cool shady space in the form of the much-neglected front verandah or porch. Once much loved, used, even slept on, these have been pushed down the pecking order by the late 20th-century triumph of the sun-seeking rear deck. Villa and bungalow restorers will almost certainly put back this feature but most would concede it was simply decorative, or for resale, because the biggest criticisms of villa verandahs and bungalow porches has always been that they are too often on the shady side of the house and, worse, face the street. Villas had narrow, long verandahs. Bungalows had deep-set high-sided porches. Houses of the 1930s had open terraces and post-war houses had wrought-iron-fringed patios, all generally aligned to the front of the house, although not exclusively to the road. They may take up a big part of the floor plan, but you can drive street after street and barely see a seat or chair on a front verandah – let alone an actual person. It seems we can very happily sit in the street and drink coffee but feel less relaxed about doing the same thing at home, where we might be seen. It’s like the mullet haircut of Kiwi folklore: our homes are all business in front and party

It’s like the mullet haircut of Kiwi folklore: our homes are all business in front and party out the back. Pleasure is something to be concealed.

out the back. Pleasure is something to be concealed, contained within the high fences of the backyard. To be seen relaxing, anywhere but at the beach, is still a little uncomfortable. Imagine if, that late on every summer afternoon or early evening as the low sun gets annoying, we moved to the front verandah with a cup of tea, a glass of wine or a good book. Imagine if every night over summer New Zealanders chose to congregate on their front verandahs rather than on their back decks. How different neighbourhoods might be. How communities might change. We’ve all seen the films in which communities gather in the cool. We admire antebellum southerners with porch swings and mint juleps or read enviously of the British Raj sipping gin and tonics on a deep-set verandah. We look at families in Brooklyn collecting on stoops and fire escapes and think that looks like fun – all the while ignoring our own shady spots. So, this summer, try it. Pick up a folding table, carry a couple of mismatched chairs out to the front verandah of a summer’s evening and relax. From this vantage point, take in the vista of the community in which you live and, if you are lucky, you might just catch a glimpse of someone else doing the same thing – raise a glass to them. Summer is for relaxing and it doesn’t matter who knows it.