Homestead

Home is where the heart is. This is a phrase I have heard all my life, but what makes a house into a home I wonder, and furthermore can one actually set out to create a home? Well within this passage I invoke both my vision of home and the intent to build or obtain it.

What follows is my vision of home, well rather what the house contains and what materials construct it, for this is only the house and garden. The home is where the heart is, subjecting that any house can be a home if the heart resides within it and that same heart yearns for it when time, location or work must separate the two.

So let me vision for you my desired construct of the house and gardens.

Picture if you will a block of land by the sea, preferably a sheltered bay where the sea laps the shore in gentle melodic tones. Along the shore front stand great trees of pine and pohutukawa amidst soft grass and the scents, within a garden of pleasure where flowers abound in many colours and shapes with butterflies and bees. Here relaxation is infused with contemplation. Here structure is abandoned in favour of stimulation and beauty. Form is favoured over function.

There are no boundaries of constructed format. This is a place where plants, insects, birds, and human cohabitate and collaborate as they would have it. The garden contains grand Oak and Willow together with fruit trees of apple and nectarine and vines of grape and passion fruit, bushes of mandarin. These are mixed with beds containing vegetables and herbs for cooking or just good health, some for drinking and some simply because of the delicious scents like jasmine. Nearby are some bee hives. This is a garden of abundance and pleasure where one can work intuitively and walk in with an empty basket and walk out enriched by beauty and with the evening meal. This is a vision where the evening meal is an enjoyable process from the growing to gathering, preparation, cooking and eating.

In harmony with the environment, the house stands nestled within the grounds. Here space is generous. Beauty and texture stand side by side amid a craftsman’s pride. The house welcomes its guests with a loving personality. Each corner opens up a new possibility and multiple levels of enjoyment where one can seek company or solitude. Rooms and spaces each have their own purpose. Here love and the passion for life are enhanced with music, books, art, pottery and furniture that weave a rich tapestry of form and function.

Within the grounds will be found small cottages of similar architecture where guests could stay for a while to regenerate and replenish the life force that sustains them.

Beyond the house and gardens is where nature presents its raw natural beauty. Here grand trees stand and birds sing. Simply put this is nature’s garden, where the wheel of life turns without the hand of man, where the only sound are the birds singing and the wind rustling through the leaves. With luck and good fortune there is a small stream and waterfall to complete the picture.

All these things I desire to have and share with all who come to the door, be they passing through or staying for a while to regenerate. Where each person is enriched by the space, and where the space itself can heal and repair the body, mind and soul, because we play our part with all the lives, large and small, from plants the house itself, playing their part in a cooperative community that is living for one purpose, for the love life itself.