Colourful kiwis

New Zealand, as you may have heard me say, is a magnificent country. The soaring green hills plummeting to turquoise seas are not particularly shy about their beauty. The landscape here is hardly subtle.

The creatures in New Zealand, however, are much more subtle than the land, as if to show that they know they will always be second fiddle to the beauty that rises all around them. New Zealand has none of Australia’s rainbow-coloured parrots—or even many of the brilliant and garishly flowered plants you see in other places. Here the parrots—where we have them—are green without a look-at-me flash of blue or red. The most showy bird I know—a tui—is garbed in a simple yet sophisticated black with a subtle tuft of white at the neck. Even the kiwi, the national symbol, is a hidden wallflower of a bird—brownish green, nocturnal, shockingly shy. Each creature seems to be saying: No, don’t take your eyes off the hills/sea/mountains to look at little old me.

The people here aren’t worlds different from that. They look out for “tall poppies”: those who stick their heads too far above their crowd of peers. Tall poppies get their heads lopped off, goes the warning. The dominant colour trend in Wellington is a palette of grey-to-black, with the cream, khaki and colour I usually wear marking me as different before I even open my mouth. The four colours people tend to paint the outside of their houses are: grey, white, beige, and pale yellow. Inside their houses, most people like a cream on cream palette. This is not a look-at-me place. Be subtle, be regular, fit in, the English genes call out.

I am an Irish-American. I have come to New Zealand to be swept away by the beauty here and by the various wonders the people have to offer. I have not, however, lost my love for colours. And, as you may also have noticed, there is a house I now own that needs a paint job. It is a house at the top of a hill in the centre of the village, a house that is so obvious from nearly every point in town that it is distinguishable from miles up the highway, even from an airplane on the descent to Wellington. What to do about that?

The first choice we made was a roof colour. We stood in the back yard of the house with potential house colours on little chips and looked at the placement of the house, the colours of the other roofs nearby, the surrounding on the hill. Grey would have been the safe colour—and I have had grey roofs in nearly every place I’ve ever lived. But this particular house is a whim, a folly, a pure expression of joy and delight; we left safety behind when we signed the papers on it in the first place. So we picked a green roof, which we thought would mirror the tree canopy around the house, help it blend into the hillside, and also give a playful counterpart to all kinds of interesting colours for the side of the place. The green, when it arrived, was less green than we had hoped, less the colour of a tree leaf and more the colour of the first shoots of spring. But it is a common colour on both houses and trees here (roofs are generally the brightest part of a house) and so we sighed and hoped a wall colour would bring some life to it.

I had wanted a house like the landscape: green like the trees and blue like the sea and yellow like the sun. I wanted to use only those colours which were found right near the house, in combinations that were natural. When I mentioned my hopes (for a blue house under my green roof—maybe with yellow trim), kiwis were horrified. “Wow—that’s really out there!” they would exclaim. “You sure have extreme taste!” The only one who was fully supportive (other than our family and Melissa, who basically counts as an internal family member) was Robyn’s husband Rob, a Scottish artist who paints with brilliant colours because New Zealand is such a bright and magnificent place after a dismal Glasgow childhood. “The colours will be beautiful together,” he assured me in his lilting accent, undimmed from decades in this county. “And you’ll sure give the locals something to talk about when there’s nothing else going on!”

Armed with this semi-vote of confidence, we picked a variety of test pots and painted swatches on the wall. These swatches horrified Dave, Johnny, and the rest of the builders. “You people are WILD!” Dave told us. “Those test colours on the wall—are you thinking of painting those on the OUTSIDE of your house?” others asked us. A friend who had offered to lend her colour sense blanched when she saw the six options. “Have you thought of something much more subtle?” she asked. “Green roofs mostly just go with white walls,” the painter muttered.

We were faced with a seriously difficult position. I am clear that I don’t want to live in a white/beige/grey house. And at the same time, I don’t much like to stand out in a crowd and seriously dislike giving anyone any reason to talk about me behind my back. I might be Irish in my colour sensibility, but I’m still an introvert. And this house was at the top of a hill in the centre of town; there’s a way it belongs to the town as well as belonging to us. I didn’t want to do anything to totally out of character with the other (all yellow with one outlying pale green) houses on the hill.

As I struggled between the palest blue and the palest periwinkle, I realised that while I liked the periwinkle better, the blue was more fitting because it was found so often in nature. New Zealand wasn’t much of a periwinkle country. Then Rob walked up the side of the house, and he picked a single agapanthus flower. The green was the colour of the roof; the periwinkle the colour of the walls, with a deep purple running through the centre. Right next to our house, we had our sign. Periwinkle it was.

Dave tried to tell us that he thought the paint would cost twice as much because of the boldness and the amount of pigment, and that I would peel much more quickly. I, desperately trying to get a handle on the individual construction of colour, explained that we were looking at pastels, all of them, and that we had eliminated the darker or brighter colours already. “Are you kidding!” Dave told me, “every colour up there is a shocker. You get a deep colour—like the colour of your shirt there, and it just costs more and it doesn’t hold up. The conditions here don’t support it. That’s why white or cream is the best way to go.”

I looked at my royal blue shirt, one of the brightest colours I own. “You think the colour we’re talking about is in the same family as this?” I asked, incredulously. “I would call this a deep colour; I would call the colour we’ve chosen a pastel.” Dave snorted at my language. I went to get the test pot and opened it, the pale periwinkle blue nearly white against the dark shirt. Dave laughed, abashed, “Ok, maybe it’s not quite as dark as I remembered,” he told me. “It’s your house anyway.”

And with that, as the biggest vote of confidence I would get, I had them buy paint and being to paint the walls. And I adore the colour. I love the way it is blue in some lights and lavender in others. I love the way it matches the strength of the green roof but contrasts in colour. I love that it blends in with the yellows, creams, and greens of the other houses on the hill and is also distinctly itself.

The house painting has stopped with just one wall painted while the painter moves inside to prep for the kitchen which arrives next week. But the glimpse of periwinkle on the side is still bringing attention and still raising controversy even in its semi-finished state. We ran into people we know on the beach as we gazed adoringly at the colour. “So have you picked a house colour,” they asked. We nodded and pointed delightedly at the wall we were so clearly admiring. “So that’s the FINAL colour?” the wife asked. We nodded, impervious to the doubtful tone in their voices. “And that’s the new roof there, too, the green?” asked the husband. I looked right at him and smiled, his unvoiced critique thick in the air between us. “We took all the colours straight from the garden,” we told him as he looked baffled. “The house is painted for an agapanthus,” I told him. But it could have been a hebe or an iris or a violet. His face broke into an actual smile. “So it is,” he said. “So it is.” And if he still doesn’t like the colour, that’s ok. At least now it makes sense in the New Zealand landscape: a pale periwinkle flower facing an azure sea in a cerulean sky and surrounded by deep green trees. Let the villagers talk!

(the pictures today are of the house with the swatches, the house being painted its lovely periwinkle, and a Kea--the silly native parrot we met on our journey south)