Live in art

In the Burns-Nevin house, pizza is not a convenience food. First you blend four different grains to make the dough base. Then you pick and dice a mixture of herbs from the garden. You chop firewood. You stoke the pizza oven. And, as the evening wears on and the guests eat heartily of your unique, home-made cuisine, you restoke it and restoke it to keep the pizzas coming…

 

It is, says Julie Burns-Nevin, hard work. But it is the way she and her artist partner, Gary Nevin, do things – everything, not just pizzas. They start from the ground up and they do it their own way.  

“It’s just a different philosophy,” says Julie. “Instead of working hours a day to make money to pay other people to do things for you, you spend hours a day working for yourself.”

And, of course, when you are building a house instead of pizzas – as Gary and Julie did, starting in 2001 – you spend years doing it; more than four years in fact. But you end up with a place that is so different, so individual, it really isn’t a house at all: it’s a three-dimensional work of art; a self-commissioned piece about your family; a sculpture you happen to live in.

From the outside their house, situated on a knoll overlooking Coromandel farmland just south of Whitianga, looks fairly conventional: a golden-hued, two-storey adobe home with a deep verandah. But walk through the arched copper doors into the central atrium and it feels as if you’ve wandered inside a fantasy sandcastle. The walls are 30cm thick and textured, as if they have been patted into shape (which they have, except that Gary and Julie worked with stabilised adobe – a mixture of clay, pulped newspaper and cement). 

 

There are few straight lines: the staircase curves, the doors arch, the central pillar twists. All is artistic, romantic, medieval flavoured. 

The walls glow with cellulose-based pigment in chalkboard colours – turquoise, pink, ochre – and are studded with bright fragments of glass and china. Sunlight fingers poke through porthole windows.  The earth floor, decorated with swirls of river rocks and driftwood, undulates underfoot.

“Not practical for furniture,” notes Julie, “so we don’t have much.”

The two children’s bedrooms open off this area. Cassandra’s room is a Sleeping Beauty vision in shades of lavender and turquoise. Vincent’s is unadorned teenage boy, with surfing posters and a timber floor. “He told us he wanted normal,” says Julie with a shrug. 

Vincent and Cassandra, who now live away from home, were 13 and 10 when their parents started building the house. The family had lived in a macrocarpa-clad home in nearby Cooks Beach, but moved after the local council abandoned an environmentally friendly waste management plan for the area. Fellow potters and now neighbours, Alan and Julia Rhodes, who owned the land, subdivided to give them a building site and the plan for a hand-built adobe house was hatched. 

 

During building, the family lived onsite in a 10sqm shed. Power for the concrete mixer used in making the adobe was provided by an extension lead from the Rhodes’ place next door. There was no shower or fridge, lamps for light and a gas barbecue for cooking. Photographs show the site as a sea of mud, dotted with piles of wine bottles (used as insulation in the floor), stones and recycled building materials. In one shot, Vincent sits at a small table, resignedly doing his correspondence schoolwork amid the turmoil.

Almost every day for two years, Gary and Julie  shovelled earth, carried water and carted the wet adobe mix up ladders to build the walls that grew – excruciatingly slowly – over the post-and-beam framework built by Hot Water Beach Construction. Says Julie: “I’d hear the grrk grrk of the mixer starting up in the morning and cringe.” 

 

Two more years of part-time finishing work followed. Vincent’s room was finished first, then the rest of the downstairs area and the curving staircase with its driftwood railings. The upstairs kitchen and living space, where the couple now spend most of their time, has timber floors and more furniture than downstairs: a table, bright chairs and cabinetry – much of it recycled – a low-energy fridge and washing machine, a tiny TV and a “temperamental beast” of an Aga stove which the couple got for free.

Walls are decorated with plates, pottery, tiles, lanterns – things that look good but are also useful. The feeling is cheerful and rustic. Windows look out on to the back garden and the composting toilet is a short walk away along a boardwalk.

“The first thing I notice when I go to a house in the suburbs these days is how sealed off you are,” says Julie. “Here, the whole house breathes.” 

Though the materials used in the house were cheap – hundreds of tonnes of earth scalpings came from the local quarry and doors, windows and many  fittings were passed on by friends – Julie estimates  the cost of their 185sqm home was comparable to a conventional home once lost earnings are taken into account. Gary’s pottery business – he makes quirky figurines and garden sculptures – wound down during the years spent on the house and the couple are now building it up again. 

 

Gary works on one-off pieces in his garden studio while Julie makes the smaller, fast-selling stock items  such as little birds, flying pigs and tiles. To make ends meet they have part-time jobs, doing bach maintenance and pruning at local orchards.  

The garden is intensively planted with rambling vegetables, herbs and a rich array of fruit trees. Julie harvests them conscientiously, bottling, stewing and making jams and sauces, so that her grocery bill is kept to $160 a week: “You can grow a surprising amount on an acre of land,” she says.

With the pottery business, their part-time jobs and gardening, the couple still usually work seven days a week. In winter, when visitor numbers are down, Julie admits that it can feel as if they are trapped in a routine – “There isn’t the big-city stimulation”. She’d like to organise house swaps with like-minded people on the other side of the world.

“If we want to change things in our life, we will. We like to show there are other ways of living. But, in the end, the way we live is just being true to ourselves.”