Why is this place significant?

Why is this place Category 1 / Category 2?

Frank and Honey Haigh, and the Haigh House in Bell Road, Auckland Frank Hadyn Haigh was born in Invercargill in May 1898. He initially worked for the Lands and Survey Department in Wellington before being trained as a lawyer. After working for Russell, Campbell and McVeagh he established his own firm in 1928. Haigh became well known for representing difficult cases and politically unpopular clients. He acted for the waterside union during the 1951 waterfront dispute, was active in the environmental movement, and was a prominent proponent of homosexual law reform and racial equality. The future Prime Minister, David Lange, was one of many law clerks who were attracted to work in his practice by the early 1960s, drawn by shared political and social perspectives. In December 1930, Haigh married Annie Bridget (Honey) O'Connor. The Haighs became important members of the Auckland intelligentsia who were described by Eric McCormick as: 'that little group of Aucklanders, presided over by Mr A.R.D. Fairburn, whose bodily ailments are diagnosed by Mr Douglas Robb, whose literary productions are printed by Mr R.F. Lowry, whose habitations are designed by Mr Vernon Brown, whose legal affairs are disentangled by Mr F.H. Haigh, whose persons and inner lives are portrayed in the fiction of Mr Frank Sargeson'. The Haigh house was designed by Vernon Brown and constructed by R. Savory Ltd. in 1942. At this time restrictions on the use of certain building materials had come into force under emergency regulations occasioned by the outbreak of the Second World War, which restricted the use of iron, steel and brass. The use of such materials and the construction of buildings valued at over £1500 required special permission from the government appointed building controller. In 1942 regulations were also brought in restricting the use of portland cement, electrical wiring and bitumen. The regulations may have had an impact on the materials chosen for the house, but Brown's design philosophy was also based on vernacular architecture, including the timber houses and baches built and used by many ordinary New Zealanders. As an innovative and influential designer, Brown is credited with introducing a rustic modernist architectural style to New Zealand architecture. His strongest influence was on the members of 'The Architectural Group', also known as the Group Architects and the Group Constructing Company. They followed in Brown's footsteps by building simple, inexpensive, open plan houses, and their work in turn influenced other local architects over the coming years. Brown's design for the Haighs' house followed the style for which he is best known: the weatherboard house finished in white paint and creasote, and featuring a low pitched lean-to roof. These houses have been described by the architectural historian Peter Shaw, as being like 'a coconut with a bite taken out.' Brown was already a friend of the Haighs at the time he designed the house, and Honey Haigh recalled that he had very definite ideas about what their house should look like. Brown carefully designed his houses to interact with their environment and he paid particular attention to the fall of natural light, the views, topography and size of the site in his design solutions. The house he designed for the Haighs was on two levels with a protruding bedroom lower than the rest of the house, making use of the sloping characteristics of the Bell Road site. The orientation of the house was evidently carefully considered, with Rangitoto Island being visible from all rooms except the kitchen and bathroom. Brown played similar attention to the interior. When Mrs Haigh noted that she had inherited her mother's piano and wanted it in the living room, Brown's response was blunt: 'You're not having that awful thing in my lovely room!' A compromise was reached with Brown designing an alcove for the instrument, which remains in the house. Two years after the house was constructed, the artist May Smith painted a seaside-themed mural in its hall. Active in leftist politics, Smith was a part of the Haighs' social circle and her work was admired by Vernon Brown. Brown is known to have previously used murals in his design work, having designed a shipping office in Queen Street in 1938 that included murals on its interior walls. The house at 76 Bell Road was a gathering place for friends of the Haighs. Poets such as A.R.D. Fairburn, R.A.K. Mason and Denis Glover 'knew the Haigh home as a haven of hospitality and encouragement.' Frank and Honey Haigh were famous for their Sunday lunch parties. Numerous well-known people from here and overseas are known to have visited the Haighs in Bell Road. British actors Sir Lawrence Olivier and Vivien Leigh were amongst the Haighs' more famous guests. The Haighs were generous hosts who each year welcomed groups of architecture students who came to visit the house. The Haighs brought up their three children at the Bell Road house and a third bedroom was added around the 1950s to accommodate the growing family. Frank Haigh retired in 1987 and was appointed an OBE in 1990 for services to the community. He died two years later at the age of 94 and was survived by his wife and two sons. During the late 1990s the Haigh house was rented out and the site was subsequently sold for redevelopment. The Haigh family was keen to see the house preserved, and to this end it was offered to the Unitec Institute of Technology to become a exhibition and seminar space and an archive for architectural drawings. Efforts were made to raise the necessary funds for the relocation but the project eventually fell through. The house was subsequently acquired by Owen and Mary Stevens and removed from its Bell Road site in October 1999. Prior to it being moved to a temporary location, the circa 1950s bedroom addition was demolished. The New Site The Haigh House was further relocated in 2000 to a rural site at Pahi in the north Kaipara in three separate sections. The site had previously been used as farmland, associated with a property already owned by the new purchasers. Over the next two years the house was put back together and restored to its 1942 form, internally and externally. New structural work included placing the building on brick footings as at Bell Road, rebuilding the chimney and constructing main entrance steps modelled on the original ones in Remuera. The relocation of the house also involved cutting through the May Smith mural, which was already showing signs of deterioration. The mural was subsequently restored by professional art conservators. During the relocation the new owners made considerable efforts to site the building in a way that was sensitive to Brown's architectural principles. Although the new setting differed from the original suburban location in aspects of its topography and character, the house was arranged to face the same orientation as it did on its original section. The owners also landscaped the new site to imitate the path and terrace layout from the original Bell Road site. A 'Bell Road' road sign was placed near the house, providing a reference to its former site and helping to identify the structure as a relocated building. Internally considerable effort has been expended to retrieve aspects such as the original paint scheme, which included a vibrant fire-engine red in the bathroom. The house is currently used as a private residence and as a homestay.

The former Haigh House is a single-storey timber building, sitting on a slightly elevated spot overlooking the Kaipara Harbour. The site slopes down gently from west to east, and is approached from a lane between Pahi Road and Cloon Even farm. The house is surrounded by a terraced patio on its northern, western and eastern sides, which is bounded by a basalt retaining wall to the west and a shallow, timber ha-ha to the east. The building is set in a rural landscape, and lies a short distance to the north of the waterside settlement at Pahi. The house is freestanding, with a monopitch roof structure concealed behind parapets, giving the house an appearance of a series of inter-related cubic forms (including two primary formal elements and various secondary elements). The house is clad mainly in timber weatherboards with dark creosote finish, but also uses some light-coloured painted timber cladding, the colour of which matches the timber cladding within 'cut out' recesses. Behind the parapets is a simple corrugated iron roof, shedding water through the side of the parapet, to an external gutter mounted directly on the external wall sheathing. The pitch of the roof is reflected in the angle of various ceilings inside the house. A paved patio has been extended into the roofed recess adjacent to the lounge and dining area, and this steps down to two slightly lower patio levels on the northern side of the lounge. These have no roof cover over them, and allow unrestricted access of sunlight into the lounge. The paving itself consists predominantly of re-used concrete slabs and Glenburn bricks, which come from the Bell Road site. Most of the exterior timber window joinery follows the pattern of state houses being constructed in 1942, although steel joinery is used in the larger windows on the northern side of the building. Internal materials typically consist of heart rimu framing, floors, architraves and weatherboards, while fibrous plasterboard interior walls and ceilings are also used with a simple fibrous plaster cornice. The rimu framing of the walls is typical of houses of the period. The layout incorporates three bedrooms and a bathroom to the southern side of the main entrance hall, and a large living room to the north. Other rooms on the western side of the building, which have the less spectacular views, include the kitchen, laundry and dining room. Most of the rooms incorporate built-in furniture, which was a feature of Vernon Brown's architectural design work. Beds, bookcases, dressing tables and wardrobes have all been created for the spaces that they inhabit, allowing the architect maximum influence over the appearance of the interior. Some movable furniture from the Haighs' occupation of the house have been acquired by the present owners, notably Honey Haigh's piano, piano stool and a simple mirror with chain. Other furniture in the house has been carefully replicated from examples known to have been used in the house during the Haighs' occupancy. The simplicity and functionality of the building encapsulates Brown's 'bite out of a coconut' approach to rustic modernism, which accorded with aspects of his political philosophy. It displays his preferred method of designing domestic architecture, which made use of inexpensive local materials to form carefully designed open-plan structures. The interior of the house features the economical layout and uncluttered approach for which he was known. At the time, it formed a considerable contrast with the English Cottage styles used in more conventional circles. The former Haigh House was one of a number of houses designed by Vernon Brown for sloping suburban sites, and several of these remain. They include the house that he designed for his own family at 91 Arney Road, Remuera, Auckland, which like the Haigh House is in the familiar 'coconut with a bite taken out' style. It was built in 1939, and was registered as a Category I Historic Place by the New Zealand Historic Places Trust in 1995. Another example is the Wright House in Takapuna which, like the former Haigh House, was built in 1942. Few dwellings designed by Brown for rural settings are known, although he did create a house near Wanganui in circa 1951, Harper House, which was located in a flat, fairly rural area. While this house employed a similar external style to the Haigh House, it comprised a single-level structure in a more open, sprawling design. This contrasts with his comparatively compact suburban houses. The importance of Brown and the Haigh House has been recognised in several surveys of twentieth century architecture. Brown was chosen by architect and lecturer Matthew Bradbury as one of the ten most influential architects of the last sixty years in a recent article in New Zealand Home & Building. In late 2000 design historian Douglas Lloyd-Jenkins and architect Bill McKay selected the Haigh house as one of the top fifty local homes of the twentieth century in an article published in New Zealand Home & Entertaining. McKay and Lloyd-Jenkins felt that in the design of the Haigh House, Brown most successfully combined both elegance and informal style, and that it was through the design process of this house that Brown clarified his relationship with modernist architecture. The building is said to have been one of the most influential domestic houses in New Zealand, in terms of its impact on the architectural profession, and has also been included in an international register of modern movement buildings published by the Documentation and Conservation of buildings, sites and neighbourhoods of the Modern Movement (DOCOMOMO) in 2000. The former Haigh House was one of nineteen such buildings included from New Zealand.

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A fully referenced version of this is available from the NZHPT Northern Region Office Please note that entry on the New Zealand Heritage List/Rarangi Korero identifies only the heritage values of the property concerned, and should not be construed as advice on the state of the property, or as a comment of its soundness or safety, including in regard to earthquake risk, safety in the event of fire, or insanitary conditions.