As part of my job, I venture into other people’s houses.
I go into the kitchen and measure the distance between the walls, the different ceiling heights. I take note of the two-door garage filled with a lifetime supply of old rugby boots, bikes and surfboards, a deceased parent’s washing machine. The cars, left out on the driveway.
Back in the office, we piece together the drawings, and add phrases like, ‘awkward kitchen layout’, ‘living room lacks connection to the outside’, ‘more storage’. Then begin the revealing process of trying to understand our client’s priorities, their values and the ways the best versions of themselves would like to live.
The mixed-housing suburban, middle-class dream of having a swimming pool and a scullery. Auckland Council tells us that a child could “very easily” climb a 1.8m-high neighbouring fence and jump down onto a 12mm-wide glass one. Trespassing their way to drowning in a city surrounded by open bodies of water. Tāmaki Makaurau, an abundant fertile place, ‘desired by many’. Land of a hundred lovers, a city not really living up to its name.
As part of my dating life, I sometimes venture into other people’s houses. There was the Tech Guy, who in his echoey concrete apartment had so many bikes he couldn’t open the front door. His bathtub, filled with metallic mosaics and Aesop soap bottles. It was so big that at parties people would gather in there. The bathtub steps, dotted with pot plants and places to sit.
The Artist, who chose to have a single bed, so she had enough room to display her other artist friends’ work on shelves she made from pieces of wood from Bunnings. The Musician, who lived in a rickety house off K Road that tilted towards the motorway and whose flatmates made her take the shampoo and body-wash in and out of the shower each time she used it. At night-time, the constant whirring sound of trucks below would keep me awake, as they crossed over the rumble strips with a thuck, thuck, thuck.
My ex-girlfriend was a baker, who lived in an apartment without a kitchen. Well, technically, it was just outside, in between the neighbours’ bathroom and living room. The old man next door would shuffle across in his underwear, making his way to the toilet, as I carried dirty plates to the sink. I sometimes wondered what her neighbours thought about me coming and going from the one-bedroom apartment.
She lived in a typical Shanghainese lane house. These were buildings that up until the Chinese Revolution were comfortably inhabited by a few families. They’ve since been renovated to accommodate multiple apartments, in a growing city of 25 million people, without the proper layout or infrastructure to do so. There is a loosening on spatial layout rules and a sense of co-habitation and ownership.
Eventually, I moved into an Art Deco-style building, where I accidentally walked into a paper-burning ceremony for my neighbour’s deceased family member. Smoke had started to fill the lower levels; worried that I would freak out at the sight of the open flames in the stairwell, one of the women quickly explained, “We’re communicating with our dead ancestors”. There were a few of them crouched together, in mourning. I sent a message to my flatmates, “Don’t worry about the smell of smoke from downstairs”.
As part of Beijing Design Week, I went on a media tour of Caochangdi Art District. The editor of Metropolis magazine asked me if I wanted to sneak away to find Ai Weiwei’s blue studio door. “Cool,” I said, standing in front of a large blue gate, CCTV cameras pointed at us in all directions. Two black cars with tinted windows waited outside on the empty street.
We had started to walk away, when I heard the hinges of the metal door creak and turned around to see Ai Weiwei. Quickly, I tried to think of something to say. “We were just admiring the flowers in your basket.” I pointed to his bike chained to a tree outside, the daily fresh flowers he placed in it a symbol of his defiance. “Oh, thank you!”, he smiled graciously and started to walk over to us.
We asked about his exhibition, set to open in Alcatraz that week. The Chinese government had confiscated his passport and banned him from leaving the country. “They’re just doing what they think is best,” he said, tilting his head towards the cameras, a calmness in his voice. “Should we take a selfie?”, he laughed, before disappearing into one of the black cars.
