My beautiful house. This is not it.

Perhaps the client had been reading too many glossy design magazines, but he was quite explicit about his requirements. Inside-outside movement... a building with a direct relationship with the landscape...

Bringing the outside in was the key idea, so that we could feel we were sitting in the garden 24 hours a day, all year round. The tree is like a sculpture, full of character. Inspire your house plans?

The architectural sketches promised shoddy materials, untested construction techniques and every corner cut -- even the non-Euclidean ones -- so that the cladding would fail and let in moisture in an accelerating spiral of leakage and rot. The client was very impressed.

When the finished product looked like this instead, the recriminations led to a Parliamentary Inquiry. How could enforcement have been so shamefully lax, allowing the builder to ignore the cheap tilt-up construction intended by the architect and to substitute Italian marble for painted particle-board? To show how seriously the fiasco was taken, there was even talk of 'Systems failure'. Personally I blame the Amended Building Act of 1991. Also the Hoteliers and Publicans Act of 1958.

The client was forced to hire a team of taggers and vandals from Silverstream Highschool to bring the building down to the usual NZ standards of temperature and humidity and unexploded munitions.



UPDATE: Let us disabuse B⁴ of his misconceptions, revealed within the comments, about living conditions within the average New Zealand home.