Charlotte Fielding has reviewed Jane Ussher and John Walsh’s new book Rooms: Portraits of remarkable New Zealand Interiors for The Spinoff:
‘As someone who is hoping to buy a modest first home (scrolling through Trade Me listings daily, bored of the endless greybeigewhite walls with orange wood trim and grey carpet, dreaming of filling my future home with colour and the things I love) I found that the pages of Rooms: Portraits of Remarkable New Zealand Interiors soothed my brain. The images in Rooms are the antithesis of the bland, boring, homogeneous real estate I have been consuming for many months.
Listing after listing on Trade Me shows freshly painted interiors, with bland staging furniture. All the life removed from a room in preparation for someone else to move in. On a diet of staged-to-sell real estate, I hunger for a little wildness. Something off-centre and un-matching. Something lived-in, that reflects the sensibilities of the humans who reside there. Something strange and unexpected, like the solidly square chairs in Clyffside, Marina Bay, with the shapes of birds in flight cut out of them, or the vast collection of bowls in Pirongia House. The reaching hands in Carterton House, or the beautiful murals in Eastbourne House, Wellington. And that’s only in the first 50 pages. The whole book is full of delights and surprises.’
Read the full review here.
