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Beach shacks/ baches/ cribs

The Australian notes the slow passing of the uncomplicated beach shack/ bach/ crib. "Canny buyers and developers pull down shacks and build architect-designed abodes of louvres and scrubbed timber, or "Fediterranean" crossovers with stucco and stained glass."
OZ 07.01.05

Similarly in New Zealand, the beach bach is under threat. And this real estate agent Craig Matheson is OK with that: "In some ways it's fortunate. I love to see old baches, but lots were badly built without permits or codes of compliance. They're a dying breed. It's one of those progress things. "
NZH 11.12.04

The James Hardie (NZ) website attempts a definition: "the classic Kiwi beach-side bach is almost deliberately ‘anti-style’. Possibly the only aesthetic that the classic Kiwi bach ever conformed to was the ‘she’ll be right’ school of architecture. Often thrown together from an eclectic mixture of materials that came to hand; fibrolite, weatherboards, corrugated iron, packing cases, recycled windows and doors, the bach was painted with ‘leftovers’ or paint-shop ‘specials’ and decorated with whatever washed up on the beach, or was surplus to requirements at home." This article blames the demise on coastal land values, OTT building regulations, and on a 'more sophisticated' Kiwi.
James Hardie - The great kiwi bach goes contemporary

Down in Nelson, they're wondering what to do with the nine ancient baches sitting on a natural stone reef called Boulder Bank. There are arguments both ways. A year ago they were seeking money to get a heritage study done.
Historic Places Trust

Things aren't looking good for the baches at Loch Katrine, an isolated lake in the South Island. The Listener reported in May that, "the Department of Conservation (DOC) decided that the settlement of 60 baches should go, sacrificed to a principle that Peter Lawless, its acting policy manager, puts like this: "We should not have private buildings not open to public access on public land." This new DOC poilicy is likely to affect many bached around the country which were built on land leased from the Crown.
Listener May 2004
Tongaporutu baches

And lastly, I remember it being unlawful to maintain baches on Auckland's Rangitoto Island in the '80s. The leases were up and they were to be demolished as the owners died. It's good to see now that the remaining 34 are all protected, and have their own conservation trust.
Rangitoto Historic Conservation Trust

Comments

  • peter_j
    edited January 1970
    Elizabeth Farrelly has just written about the disappearance of the barefoot building at the beach in the Sydney Morning Herald: "Gone is the humble shack, icon of understatement, the casual, casuarina-shrouded, plain-brown-wrapper not-architecture of time past; gone the flies, the long-drop, the outdoor shower, the sand inside and out."

    She blames the trend to overly comfortable buildings to the human being's urge to plastinate. I had to check that word out, and discovered that it means, "a process involving fixation and dehydration and forced impregnation and hardening of biological tissues." A day at the beach indeed.
    SMH 19.01.05 (rego req'd)
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