RURAL ARCHITECTURE.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 79, 3 April 1928, Page 6

RURAL ARCHITECTURE.

Perhaps the outstanding characteristic of the modern mind to-day is a tendency to uniformity. Distinctions are being levelled in every direction; some move up and some move dpwn. National costumes, national idiosyncrasies, and could we but say national antipathies, too,* are disappearing. The Queen of Afghanistan has captured the admiration of Paris with her faultless robing, while the bowler hat promises soon to be as familiar an object in the East as in the West. All this would seem to be for the good of mankind, but at the same time there are aspects to be regretted. One is the "levelling up," as it were, of city and country life. Motor buses, wireless plants, telephones, electric light—all the ingenuity of modern invention, is being applied to alleviate th® hard lot of the lonely country dweller—and quite right, too. There could be no better development of civilisation than that. But why the modern suburban bungalow style of architecture in the country? In all our farming areas the modern bungalow is beginning to grow, growing gaily because many of us are proud of it, but in time it will make our lovely countrysides look just like city suburbs. I am an ardent admirer of the new suburban bungalow—in the suburbs. I thoroughly appreciate it and all its clever new contrivances and conveniences. But Nature in New Zealand has blessed us with a land rich in scenery and full of rare charm, and it would therefore seem to be our duty to develop some sensa of an agricultural architecture worthy of Nature's unique display for our country dwellings. Let us have telephones and electric conveniences in the country by all means, but why not run the wires underneath the eaves of old-time farmsteads? Why not install the electric stove in a lattice-windowed kitchen of olden style with deep window benches for the pots of scarlet geraniums? Why not keep our hay in old-fashioned lofts with pigeon coops? Why not mingle the squeak of a pump handle with the clank of milk pails? What's wrong with pumps that they should have "gone out" in the country? I can remember visiting the country long ago when I was so small that the hens and turkeys used to peck me and I had to be defended with a tea-tree broom. (You rarely see a tea-tree broom in the country nowadays, and yet it is very rustic. If I possessed a farm I'd have a tea-tree broom and a pump even if I didn't use them, just for the look of things.) Thoso were the days of the cool, brick-floored dairy with pans all arow, sheltered by willows whose precincts Mere only to be invaded in the company of accredited chaperons; the days of verbena-scented gardens and orchards, where one must "whistle all the time"; of tiny trini-papered bedrooms much beflounced and becurtained with chintz-covered box furniture, trumpet-lilied water ewers and brown Windsor soap; the days of alarmingly clean parlours adorned with shellframed family portraits and horsehair chairs covered with white-crochetted antimacassars. You knew you were in the country in those days! I can remember washing days under the willows. Women in sunbonnets bending over large wooden tubs with grips like spade handles, while down by the stream a boilerful of clothes bubbled over in the sun. It was hard work, work that women should never have been doing really, lifting those heavy tubs to empty them, and we woyld not ask for that again, but why not still the old wooden tubs properly plugged and drainpiped, of course ? What I mean is, one longs for some return to the old rustic charms of the countryside, in semblance, though not in fact; some conception of farmsteads that look the part in their surroundings. Why could we not have homesteads and buildings that look as though they belonged to the New Zealand bush ? ° —R.B.