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The French Bay House
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| William's hut in the garden 1950s Photo Gerhardt Rosenberg |
The house was little more than a basic bach set on a steeply sloping site densely covered with kauri and other trees. There was a small garage at road level which was later converted into a studio. From the road there was a steep path down to the house. A tiny kitchen doubled as the entrance lobby. A small lean-to area served as laundry, bathroom and dining area. On the other side of the kitchen was a living room with an alcoved porch off it beside a fireplace. Colin painted a large mural for the living room wall.
The house had electricity and town supply water, but the outside toilet facilities were very primitive. Initially the children slept in the lean-to area of the living room; Colin & Anne slept in the tiny porch.
In 1955 a new bathroom was constructed in an area dug out beneath the lean-to area of the living room where a bunkroom for the children was also constructed. Entry was through a kind of trap-door in the floor with a steep stair which Colin constructed. Colin was assisted in the building by Peter Webb (then a colleague at the Gallery) and other friends. The basement area was later expanded to form sleeping bays for the children—open-sided rooms with bunk beds and shelves. The roof of this area was used as a deck—wooden boards covered with black malthoid cloth (it was concreted after the McCahon era)—where much of the social activity of the house went on in warmer and dry weather.
In 1958 McCahon built a bedroom for the boys underneath the garage/studio where he did most of his painting. He wrote in 1972:
1958 was a good year. I built an extra bedroom under the quite extraordinary garage, my studio, we had on the top of our domestic cliff—the boys were moved into that. It had bunks and a clay floor and lovely sliding windows, sliding on coloured glass marbles. The floorboards upstairs were rather far apart and Molly Ryburn [a colleague at the Gallery] supplied a carpet (which I still have in my present studio) to make it more comfortable—the boys had clay and I had carpet. (a survey, p. 26)
The smallness and inconvenient simplicity of the dwelling often shocks visitors nowadays, but the McCahon children have mostly warm memories of their primitive living conditions. Below the house was a clearing in the trees, forming a sort of yard that contained fruit trees, flowers and shrubs, a vegetable garden, a chook house and a washing line. The paths and retaining walls on the property were all built by Colin.
One childhood friend of the family remembers the house as an inspirational place—vital, full of conversation and music and the smells of studio and domestic life—with a tremendous sense of ‘home’. The artist Pat Hanly who visited in October 1957, en route to Europe, with the photographer Barry Millar, found the McCahon place refreshingly ‘modern’ in style (after Colin’s idiosyncratic alterations), and an antidote to the stuffiness of most New Zealand houses of the period, especially in Christchurch where he had been studying at art school.
The growing size of the children was probably a main reason the McCahons decided to move to the city in 1960. It is possible, too, that they were unsettled by their visit to America for several months in 1958. Colin wrote in 1972:
We went home to the bush of Titirangi. It was cold and dripping and shut in—-and I had seen deserts and tumbleweed in fences and the Salt Lake Flats, and the Faulkner country with magnolias in bloom, cities—-taller by far than kauri trees. My lovely kauris became too much for me. I fled north in memory and painted the Northland panels (a survey, 1972).
Nevertheless, the period after the return from America up to the departure from Titirangi was one of the most productive in McCahon’s career. Significantly perhaps, the immediate environment of the Titirangi and French Bay came to play less of a role in his work than it had earlier in the 1950s as his work expanded in various new directions that owed less to direct environmental stimulus. The kauri panels of The Wake (1958) may be viewed as among the last significant works in which McCahon alluded directly to the landscape which had so occupied him since 1953.
Another factor that may have influenced their move to the city is that Titirangi was an isolated place for Anne to live, with Colin's working in the city and involved in many activities out of working hours, including theatre productions, teaching art classes, and socializing in the pub. He often did not get home until late at night. While the McCahons were well-liked by most of their neighbours, there are also stories that the family were ostracized by some in the neighbourhood who were suspicious of artists and the relatively bohemian life style of the McCahons; this may have also contributed to their decision to leave.
After the McCahons left in 1960, the house was taken over by their friend Jacqueline Amoamo and her husband. Various alterations were made, including the creation of another deck near the garage, building a roof over part of the deck, and (eventually) the installation of a flush-toilet. The entrance path, too, was altered and concreted.