Colour: Sing it from the rooftops

Wellington architect Roger Walker is right. In allowing our new housing developments around the country to be dominated by ‘‘joyless’’ grey roofs, we are acting like sheep.

But this is not a new phenomenon. For generations, not standing out from the flock has been what being a Kiwi is all about.

It wasn’t so very long ago that an All Black who scored a try stuffed down their pride and joy, embarrassed they’d dare bring individual attention on themselves. When Jeff Wilson broke that tradition by raising an arm in triumph, the nation was scandalised we’d allowed such a showboater into our revered team.

All Black try-scoring celebrations now seem to hold little back, but housing has not experienced the same evolution.

When it comes to our homes and the colours we use, for a collection of reasons, New Zealanders are at a standstill.

The prevalence of developers with cookie-cutter land and package deals is one factor. Our obsession with a home’s resale value that makes doing anything dramatically different to a house unthinkable is another. That Kiwis generally don’t like to stand out doesn’t help either.

And so what? There are advantages to this boring palette. Having any colour of roof is better than no roof at all, and burglars no doubt avoid new suburbs because of the logistical difficulties of remembering which house they staked out.

Not having to choose between more than a few colours also greatly reduces the anxiety among homeowners of making the wrong choice, while reinforcing the rightness of their choice because so many others made the same. Phew.

But let’s not kid ourselves. While it’s great we are so wealthy as a nation that we can get upset about the colour of our housing stock, there are potential disadvantages to the sameness of this country’s $941 billion worth of homes.

These disadvantages are easily scoffed at and impossible to measure, but they are there when you stop to ask yourself a few questions.

Do rows of beige houses stupefy our national imagination? Does the collective sameness of our housing colour create a sameness of our people? Are we losing the potential to bring more joy into our lives simply by denying ourselves a coloured roof? And what value is joy anyway, and is it affected by colour?

That last one is an easy question to answer. Of course joy and colour are related. One does not walk past the pink, blues and yellows of the buildings in the Bo-Kaap area of Cape Town and feel despair. The red, green and blue roofs of the alpine villages of Nepal are uplifting and, if you’re not smiling before you tour the candy-coloured houses in Balat, Istanbul, you soon will be.

On the other hand, if your reaction to a new suburb anywhere in the country is only indifference, you’re one of the lucky ones. For many others the sameness of design and colour is asphyxiating.

There’s no easy way to change the many factors that brought about the grey roof ocean, and maybe we can’t. But we could start by acknowledging there are other options that might actually bring something good into our lives, if only we’re prepared to stray from the flock to try them.

‘‘This is not a new phenomenon. For generations, not standing out from the flock has been what being a Kiwi is all about.’’