Coastal homemaking: Navigating housing ideals,home realities,and more-than-human processes

Introduction

As urban populations expand, high natural amenity locales in the Western world—forests, bushland, and coasts—are being transformed into highly desired, lucrative locations for new housing. The cultures of housing that emerge are inflected by their location, both through form (aesthetics) and function (durability, robustness). The result does not always match the realities of these places, particularly when nature is commodified and packaged as features of new housing developments (Gillon and Gibbs, 2018; Shaw and Menday, 2013; Wood, 2002). This paper examines what it means to live in such an environment, tallying between the realised dream of that lifestyle and the everyday challenges (financial and labour) of navigating the elements at home.

By way of example we examine how houses in coastal places are composed and sustained, through close attention to homemaking practices, materials, and economic rationalities. To grasp the lived, everyday negotiation of coastal conditions, we draw on cultural geographies of home that recognise homemaking as a more-than-human endeavour: as imagined, in Western domestic cultures that see home as a site for fastidiously masking, controlling, and excluding certain forms of nature (Davison, 2016; Dowling and Power, 2013; Gillon and Gibbs, 2018; Kaika, 2004); and as lived and practiced, in recognising and following more-than-human encounters at home that work with and against prominent domestic imaginaries (Gillon, 2014; Ginn, 2014; Head and Muir, 2006; Hitchings, 2003; Power, 2009a). In this paper these encounters are given voice by way of house design, material selection, and the everyday maintenance work that residents undertake so a coastal home can endure in place.

To help understand and conceptualise the everyday work of maintaining a home, we combine cultural geographies of home with a kindred conceptual approach to built forms: architecturally inflected geographies of buildings and houses, which detail the essential socio-technical practices of maintenance and repair in urban space (Cox, 2016a, 2016b; Edensor, 2011; Graham and Thrift, 2007; Jacobs, 2006; Strebel, 2011). Following Jacobs (2006: 11), built forms are ‘building events’: ‘conceived of in this way, a building is always being “made” or “unmade”, always doing the work of holding together or pulling apart’. The lived building is recast as a ‘living building’ (Strebel, 2011) by attending to the distinct properties of building materials (Edensor, 2011), and casting nonhumans as ‘architectural practitioners’ in their own right (Jacobs and Merriman, 2011). Drivers of repair and maintenance always exceed human action, spurred by un/desirable more-than-human encounters: ‘the things that constitute urban materiality act of their own accord with other non-human things like water, air, wind, and gravity (weathering, wearing, tearing, breaking, falling)’ (Jacobs and Cairns, 2011: 82; see also Steele and Vizel, 2014). By connecting work on socio-technical practices of repair and maintenance with cultural geographies of home, this paper seeks to show how sustaining a coastal house mixes with the process of making a coastal home.

Our empirical focus is newly built housing in coastal Australia. The coastline is a principle location for housing; approximately 85% of the population resides within 50 kilometres of the coastline (Department of Climate Change, 2009: 14). Coastal cultures are fundamental to the natural psyche (Booth, 2001; Fiske et al., 1987); the desirability of the warm climate and beach lifestyle buoy a robust appeal for coastal housing in Australia. While research has sought to capture the demographic patterns underlying increased rates of coastal settlement (see Burnley and Murphy, 2004; Gurran and Blakely, 2007), less attention has been paid to what happens when people live there: what happens in everyday, grounded, material encounters with place. We profile Greenhills Beach: a new master-planned estate (MPE) in coastal southern Sydney. MPEs are a rapidly increasing form of housing supply on Australia’s suburbanising coastlines (Gillon and Gibbs, 2018; Shaw and Menday, 2013). The reproduction of MPEs along the coast impels the importance of exploring how houses are envisioned to be coastal, and how residents navigate the coastal conditions and elements in homemaking.

The paper is structured as follows. We first outline how home is given meaning by cultures of nature, drawing on more-than-human geographies to ground domestic ideals in homemaking practices. We pair this approach with research analysing socio-technical practices of maintenance and repair. The case study and methodology is then outlined: semi-structured walking interviews with 21 Greenhills Beach households. Following a description of the design components of new coastal housing developments, results are structured in two sections. First, the paper profiles homemaking via everyday chores, to explore how ideals of cleanliness are rigorously upheld in a coastal location. The second section considers the house as an achievement by looking at its material composition, and the exertions and excesses of sustaining a house by the coast, with specific attention to strategies of maintenance and repair. The paper concludes with a discussion of how cultures of coastal nature in idealised domestic settings stifle the realities of coastal homemaking: hiding difficulties, exertions, and costs. Particularly, we consider the differing economic rationalities on show in living with the elements.

Home, cultures of nature, and more-than-human homemaking

Cultural geographies of home are tracing ‘the complex entanglements of nature and culture, and of human and nonhuman agency, in shaping the domestic sphere’ (Blunt, 2005: 512). These entanglements are first imaginatively ‘untangled’, filtered through Western domestic ideals of safety, security, order, and comfort (Blunt and Dowling, 2006; Dowling and Power, 2013). Cultures of nature in suburban homes, for example, sustain fixed boundaries between inside and outside, clean and dirty, ‘human’ spaces and ‘natural’ spaces (see Blunt and Dowling, 2006; Kaika, 2004). Nature is scripted as ‘the other’ in Western private home spaces; the conditions of othering are framed on moral terms, as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. As Kaika (2004: 274, emphasis in original) explains:

by keeping outside the undesired (most of the time non-commodified) natural and social ‘things’ and processes, and by welcoming inside the desirable ones (filtered, produced and commodified), the modern home has acquired a selective porosity which is enabled by a set of invisible social and material connections.

The role attributed to nature in modern home cultures is associative to community and lifestyle, as can be seen in the portrayal of everyday life in marketing and advertising new housing developments (see Gillon and Gibbs, 2018; Wood, 2002). Nature is also commodified to sell property, where attachment and access to nature is sought-after and prized. Access to nature is a site of privilege, where uneven social-nature relations are available to different groups (Panelli, 2009)—in this case, homeowners. Viewed through domesticated filters, nature purportedly only exists in domesticated forms: nonhumans are given a muffled role as an adornment, an accent feature, a price premium, within the boundaries of home. Home spaces should be engaged with as sites where domestic ideals of nature are (re)produced: ‘the conditions under which separationist views of nature and culture are reinforced, maintained or ruptured need much more detailed attention by geographers and others’ (Head and Muir, 2006: 506).

Consequently, Cook et al. (2016: 1) argue for the ‘unbounding’ of housing and home, interrogating ‘the coproduction of the materials, meanings and practices of dwelling and worlds of finance, nature and power’. We turn to more-than-human approaches to housing as one way to unpack and ‘unbound’ (Cook et al., 2016) these stubborn modes of thinking about housing, home, and nature. As Whatmore (2006: 603) describes, a more-than-human approach captures ‘the rich array of the senses, dispositions, capabilities and potentialities of all manner of social objects and forces assembled through, and involved in, the co-fabrication of socio-material worlds’. A more-than-human lens offers a different awareness for homemaking, by analysing home as an everyday contact zone with nonhumans where routines and dispositions are formed and galvanized. Power (2009b: 1031) discusses the more-than-human home as a ‘distributed and processual’ achievement between humans, nonhumans, and materials: ‘irrevocably bound to the various affordances and capacities of the materials, objects, animals and rhythms that inhabit and shape the house-as-home, as it is to the capacities, rhythms and cultures of the human resident’. At home the cast of actors includes, but is not limited to, ‘native’ animals (Power, 2009a; Gillon, 2014) and plants (Head and Muir, 2006), and also to things less furry, planty, and plainly obvious: for example, slugs (Ginn, 2014), water (Kaika, 2004), and those that are miniscule and invisible: decaying forces and chemical reactions (Edensor, 2011; Power, 2009b).

Viewing homemaking as more-than-human exposes collaboration with, and resistance to, human intentions (see Ginn, 2014; Head and Muir, 2006; Hitchings, 2003). Studies attentive to animals and plants have shown how encounters are filtered through moral classifications of belonging: whether in attachment to companion animals (Power, 2009b) or native animals and plants that are portended to belong in home spaces (Gillon, 2014; Head and Muir, 2006; Power, 2009a); or detachment from ‘uncomfortable’ companions that subvert and disgust (Ginn, 2014). In spite of this human ordering, in practice nonhumans are shown to be ‘creative presences’ (Whatmore, 2002: 35), lively, inventive, and ‘recalcitrant’ (Braun, 2008) to prescribed regimes of belonging. Thus home’s borders are lived and complex: ‘they do not exist as clear-cut lines between inside and outside, but are multi-sited and porous’ (Power, 2009a: 30). Consequently, the successful performance of idealised home cultures can only ever be contingent, tentative, and undergoing maintenance.

In this paper, we attend to how coastal conditions and elements shape homemaking: water, sand, and salt spray affecting homemaking in desired and undesired ways. In attending to less acknowledged and less visible more-than-human interactions at home, we seek to respond to Power’s (2009a: 50) call ‘for further research into the ways that experiences of home and homemaking are shaped by the necessarily more-than-human character of home’. We explore the established, idealised ‘selective porosity’ (cf. Kaika, 2004) of homes to coastal conditions, and their lived navigation in homemaking practices.

House materials, maintenance, and repair

In honing a focus on the ‘distributed and processual’ (cf. Power, 2009b) nature of homemaking, we bring more-than-human approaches to home together with a growing geographical interest in opening up the humanist, top-down practice of architecture. Recent moves in architecturally inflected geographies are concurrently attending to buildings as ‘events’, and the human and nonhuman work that sustains and condemns them (see Jacobs, 2006; Jacobs et al., 2012; Strebel, 2011). Strebel (2011: 248) argues that buildings are ‘living’, as indicated through ‘the situated practices of those who live and work with buildings’. Building materials are also ‘living’; they have the capacity to act, alone or in alliance with nonhumans, challenging and exceeding human intent (Edensor, 2011). Materials chosen for building are selected based on their properties, capacities, and/or virtues (Cox, 2016a, 2016b; Edensor, 2011). As Jacobs et al. (2012: 129) explain, studying the work involved in sustaining a high-rise apartment block unveiled ‘the potentialities that lie in steel’s strength, concrete’s insulating capacities, glass’s magical quality of transparency, but also the fate that is heralded by how steel rusts, concrete spalls, asbestos poisons, or windows need cleaning’. When materials succumb to this ‘heralded fate’, in their perceived failure to operate how we anticipate or expect, they demand human attention and response.

Maintenance and repair are human endeavours needed to resist ageing and decay, perpetuating the ‘momentum’ of buildings (Strebel, 2011). As Jacobs and Cairns (2011: 82) indicate, ‘maintenance and repair is part of the social work that is required to offset the entropic destiny of the world’. The ‘preservation’ of built forms requires regular human input and effort: ‘once this human input lapses, leaving it at the mercy of other forms of life and of the weather, it will soon cease to be a building and become a ruin’ (Ingold, 2000: 205–206). Repair and maintenance are thus crucial activities for the smooth operation of urban places, but due to being banal, commonplace, and hidden, this crucial role was overlooked (Graham and Thrift, 2007).

We focus materially on instances of repair, maintenance, and replacement at home (see Carr and Gibson, 2016; Cox, 2016a, 2016b; Gregson et al., 2009; Miller, 2001). As Cox (2016b: 64) points out, ‘Building materials have… been the concern of “housing” studies and architecture rather than research on “home.”’ We see an important bridge between these two fields of concern in Jacobs and Merriman’s (2011) theorisation of ‘practicing architecture’: more-than-human homemaking, and housing materials and practices of maintenance and repair. For Jacobs and Merriman (2011: 212) attending to practices ‘animates’ architecture, revealing that ‘the stable architectural object (architecture-as-noun) is the effect of various doings (architecture-as-verb)’. This approach opens up the ‘emphatically humanist’ view of the world that architecture imparts, so nonhumans are also ‘architectural practitioners’:

…we might also think of other non-human architectural practitioners—pets, rodents, birds, insects, plants, moulds—who also inhabit and act with buildings in all manner of ways. There are also many other forces and actions involved in architecture—supporting, sealing, joining, weathering, peeling, rusting—which work to hold it in place or compromise its very presence. (Jacobs and Merriman, 2011: 211)

Material decay and disrepair occur on different temporal scales, revealing the work of other, less visible nonhuman practitioners. Edensor (2011: 240) explains that materials comprising buildings ‘endure at varying rates’, but as the temporal frame is extended even ‘obdurate’ materials like stone are exposed as fragile: ‘while a stone’s destiny is partly influenced by its own properties, a complex range of biological, chemical and climatic agencies continuously amend its capacities’ (Edensor, 2011: 241, see also Wilford, 2008). Power (2009b) has considered how home is shaped by ‘nature times’: diurnal cycles, seasonal changes, and ageing and decay over years. Steele and Vizel (2014) also speculate on the role of the elements—fire, water, air, and earth—in shaping the materiality of housing. In reconsidering home long-term, homemaking cannot be viewed as anything other than a shared process: between humans, nonhumans, materials, elements, and cultures. In this way, homemaking becomes a ‘multi-directional relation where the materiality of the house also shapes and potentially surprises, disturbs and alters residents’ sense of home’ (Dowling and Power, 2011: 77).

Working on homes, expressing skills and competences in dialogue with materials, can be formative for homeowner identities: ‘the end result is houses which are not just made from materials, but from the materials and their owners’ responses to them—responses which are themselves situated within specific gendered, social and cultural expectations’ (Cox, 2016a: 578; see also Carr and Gibson, 2016). These situated practices occur proactively, by maintaining, or reactively, by repairing and replacing. Gregson et al. (2009: 250) explain how replacement is a commodified act, taking place ‘by virtue of cost economies’, where repair is usually reserved for high-cost items, and lower-cost items are ‘jettisoned should they fail or deteriorate’. Interrogating maintenance practices unveils both the agency of materials, and the continued revision of our relationship with home and its components. Householders are motivated practically: to arrest the acute, potent material decay that comes in a saline environment; they are concurrently motivated by prominent home cultures that ask for cleanliness, order, and the homemaking exertions of ‘good’ nature. We explore these motivations, their material manifestations, and their consequences below.

Case study and methods

This research is based upon a case study analysis of Greenhills Beach, a newly built master-planned housing development located in Cronulla, southern Sydney. The Greenhills Beach development is named after the adjacent beach, and marketed as ‘the natural choice for your new home by the sea’ (Australand, 2012). The boundary is situated 500 metres from the active beach zone, separated by dune vegetation and a nature track, and built next to the last major exposed sand dune of the state-heritage listed Cronulla Sand Dunes, valued for its historic, cultural, and natural significance. The prestige of this setting is compounded by its proximity to Sydney—approximately 30 kilometres south of the central business district by road. Housing prices at Greenhills Beach are well above the Sydney median house price; the median house price at June 2018 was over $2.1 million dollars ¹ (AUD), as compared to a Sydney median price of $905,000 dollars (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2018). This price is an indication of the premium affixed to coastal property in Australia. Highly valuable housing developments like Greenhills Beach are increasingly emerging along the coastline (see Gillon and Gibbs, 2018; Shaw and Menday, 2013). Studying these types of developments is important because their reproduction has far-reaching consequences for coastal places: setting expectations and preferences for housing forms, aesthetic themes of housing delivery, and domestic ideals of homemaking, as well as reinforcing the contemporary financial exclusivity of the coastal strip. The following section outlines this further.

The primary methodology of the study was semi-structured interviews with 21 households (24 participants), conducted between June 2014 and December 2015. Seven men, 11 women, and 3 (heterosexual) couples took part. Households were recruited by a combination of letterbox drops and door knocking. Interviews ran between 30 and 90 minutes, and involved two elements. First, residents were interviewed in their homes with a semi-structured interview schedule. Attention was focused on residents’ everyday homemaking practices, with some questions about the influence of context: how the coastal environment affected house design, and whether the coastal environment had any influence on home ideals, routines, and homemaking practices. Second, in line with methodological approaches prompting participants to ‘show us your home’ (Jacobs et al., 2012) and ‘show me your garden’ (Ginn, 2014), interviews incorporated a resident-led walking tour of the garden space and house façade, with the intention that this would stimulate discussion around more-than-human encounters and regimes of negotiation, collaboration, and contestation by householders (Gillon, 2014; Head and Muir, 2006; Hitchings, 2003; Power, 2009a). It was these walking segments that sparked the impulse for this paper: where the elements and their effects became visible.

All interviews were recorded, transcribed verbatim, and thematically coded. To protect confidentiality—particularly important in a named, identified field site—quotes are presented under pseudonyms. Interviews were paired with walks around the estate (by the first author), some of which doubled as opportunities for recruitment. These walks increased awareness of the site and its conditions, and helped develop lines of questioning around homemaking practices. Subsequent document analysis of design guidelines and project home stipulations after interviews were coded helped to focus on how house designs were altered to suit the ‘coastal theme’.

The remainder of the paper explores the confluence of home cultures and everyday homemaking practices. First, we detail how expectations of coastal housing were imposed at Greenhills Beach, through the installation of a ‘coastal landscape character’ in design. The following section looks at one everyday household chore: surface cleaning. The necessary regularity of this chore troubled how expectations of cleanliness were upheld. The third section looks at the selection and maintenance of house materials and components. We examine how material selection is justified: on financial outlay, labour requirements, and the performance of a ‘coastal home’. This performance is masked by the sustaining the gloss of ‘coastal living’, which conceals the exertions and costs of homemaking.

Coastal home cultures of new housing developments

Housing juxtaposed with urban natures, such as coastlines, have a price premium and underlying architectural logics (Cook et al., 2016: 5). In taking advantage of this price premium, the coastal environment is selectively incorporated into the design and appeal of new, large, modern homes—such as those in master planned estates (MPEs). MPEs are a widespread mode of delivering new housing in Australia, and elsewhere. Through their relatively homogenous mode of delivery, and widespread appeal to an ethic of community, lifestyle, and security (Dowling et al., 2010), MPEs share roots with gated and planned communities. With the increasing development of MPEs along the coastal fringes (Gillon and Gibbs, 2018; Shaw and Menday, 2013), housing form is changing; the material geography of a more ‘suburban’ housing form grating against nostalgic coastal cultures. Here house design is commonly large, project-built, and underwritten by uniform design features. Uniform design is governed by developer-led regulations and covenants that reproduce ‘themed’ material expression—a ‘code of pecuniary beauty’ (Gwyther, 2005), which helps distinguish MPEs from surrounding suburbs (Cheshire et al., 2009; McGuirk and Dowling, 2011). Expressions of nature in MPEs principally adhere to formal, reproducible aesthetic expression, such as in façades, gardens, and backyards (Gillon, 2014; Head and Muir, 2006).

Modern coastal house designs are informed by imagined dreams of living in a coastal place, referencing tropes of nature, and nostalgic housing forms (see Gillon and Gibbs, 2018; Shaw and Menday, 2013). House designs at Greenhills Beach were first inscribed by developer-led design guidelines, to purportedly invoke a ‘coastal landscape character’ (Figure 1). The document handed out to residents included a checklist, stipulating expectations for the visual elements of the house and garden. These centred upon: roof forms and colours; façade materials (including colour, texture, and percentage coverage); articulation; garages and driveways; fencing; and an extensive list of proposed plant species (endemic, Australian native, and exotic) for the garden. Residents were encouraged to install accent features in their house façades deemed to ‘fit’ this design remit: materials and finishes deemed ‘coastal’ included corrugated iron, white/light colours, and front façades without face brickwork, and with rendered and/or cladding finishes (Australand, 2012). Some of these materials were suggested as loose nostalgic homages to ‘fibro shacks’: informal, basic dwellings that once characterised Australian seaside towns, but are being ‘demolished in readiness for the construction of seaside dream-homes’ (Shaw and Menday, 2013: 2944).

As much as was possible within the bounds of a project home template (see Dowling and Power, 2011), houses were built with awareness of environmental context. Diurnal cycles of sunlight, seasonal change, and microclimatic factors (Power, 2009b) influenced the placement of the house on the block, the positioning of windows, and in some cases consideration to heating and cooling technologies.Figure 1

Chores by the shore: Everyday regimes of cleanliness

This second section looks to the challenging influence of coastal conditions when sustaining a domestic ideal of cleanliness. Everyday affects of coastal homemaking are illustrated by different responses to the question: ‘What are your feelings about sand and water in the home?’ This question was asked to bridge a conversation around maintenance, chores, and domestic ideals. Through their responses, residents began to reveal the interactions between their houses and the material specificities of a coastal location.

First, residents discussed how sand and water had influenced the design of their homes. This frequently started a discussion around floor surfaces. Tiles, laminate, and hardwood floors were commonly installed, as they were considered hardy and easy to clean. But as residents explained this was not always the case. For Lily, the material properties of her engineered hardwood floor demanded that sand and water remained outside the house:

Interviewer: What are your feelings about sand and water in the home? Bringing sand in, that sort of thing?

Lily: With these floors? No! [laughs] They’re engineered hardwood floors, and they just dent every time that you look at them. I’d be dying if there was either in the floor, especially water because that would affect the flooring. We’ve got an outdoor shower. But again, not going to the beach that much it hasn’t been that bad. We don’t really have the flooring for it. I didn’t even think of that—again, something I didn’t think of.

Second, residents pointed to ways that they reacted to the inevitable, irksome presence of sand and water at home. To sustain cleanliness as a domestic ideal, the routinisation of surface cleaning was stretched to extremes. Luke discussed his vigilant maintenance practices:

Interviewer: Are there any differences that you’ve noticed living so close to the ocean?

Luke: Salt build-up on the windows—which validate my point about not having rendered houses. Look great now, see in about 5 years’ time when you’ve got to repaint, and you’ve got staining of the joins and stuff like that. Yeah, so you get salt, you get a lot of sand blast… Again, I think everyone has a Kärcher, a Gerni, ² so I’m always ‘Gerni-ing’—[motions cleaning] shhhhhh. It does the windows, and it’s all done. So I’ve just done these actually.

There is an irony here in the framing of these new, modern coastal homes: that their aesthetic performance— deemed ‘coastal’—requires constant and extensive maintenance in the coastal environment. These extra exertions are upsized by the large size of homes, and the ‘code of pecuniary beauty’ underpinning their display (Gwyther, 2005, see also Gillon, 2014). Justin explains how sustaining a ‘pristine’ aesthetic standard led to constant maintenance:

If we had free rein, I don’t know if we would have built to the extremes of this house… I think it’s—for two people it’s very big. I mean, you need a day just to look after that garden, and the back, and the pool. And it’s white, so you’re constantly maintaining it to look pristine. It’s such a major investment… This is all bright white, so it’s time consuming.

At the time of our interview, Lily and her family had only recently moved in to their home. Lily discussed how for her the maintenance required had taken the gloss away from coastal living:

I’ve sort of started to say that I don’t know whether living near the beach is as attractive as people talk about, because we’ve got light fittings corroding already. Just—maintenance. It’s going to be a lot. It’s a full time job. We’ve only been here six months, and already things need doing. So whereas in a normal home—our last home was brand new. We moved into it, you weren’t looking at maintenance for five years—whereas the timeline for this maintenance will be a lot earlier.

House materials, and coast-infused regimes of repair and maintenance

We now examine the varying justifications underlining the selection of house materials and components by the coast. As houses at Greenhills Beach were newly built, the interviews were well timed to discuss house design and material selections. Residents were asked to consider whether the coastal environment has influenced the design of their homes, and if it changed how they lived at home. In home tours around the garden and façade residents indicated how the coastal environment influenced cycles of maintenance and repair; their responses centred upon managing strong winds in backyards, saline conditions being harsh and prohibitive for plant growth, and salt weathering on exposed surfaces. This section illustrates how residents negotiated coastal conditions through ‘practicing architecture’ (Jacobs and Merriman, 2011) with building materials and house components—a combination of financial outlay, material properties, regimes of maintenance and repair, and contingent coastal aesthetics.

First, residents selected particular materials based on the terms of durability and financial outlay. By installing materials with specific, hardy properties (Edensor, 2011), material selection is a proactive maintenance strategy. By the coast, sea mist and salt aerosols are acute ‘architectural practitioners’ (Jacobs and Merriman, 2011). When waves break, salty marine aerosols are created in a sea mist and are blown onshore (see Cole et al., 2003). When salt aerosols are allowed to settle on a surface, they have corrosive properties: speeding up the rate of material decay, and showing up on fixtures and finishes as blemishes and oxidised stains (Cole et al., 2003). Corrosion rates are determined by the properties of building materials. For instance, porosity affects how prone materials are to salt decay: mortars and bricks are more porous than most stone used in building construction (Lopez-Arce et al., 2009: 846). Hayley and Tom were careful to install marine-grade stainless steel on exposed house surfaces:

Hayley: The only thing we’ve had to worry about really is the rust factor. But we factored that in before we started building.

Tom: Yeah, a lot of stainless steel. A lot of other homes, people haven’t thought about it, it’s all rusted.

Hayley: It has to be a higher grade.

Tom: Yeah, stainless steel 318. ³ So that costs a bit more money—but we’d rather spend the money than replacing things six months down the line.

Discussion with other residents revealed that due to budgets, this strategy was not widely available. Paige spoke to this friction by discussing their roof—the decision-making process hinging on the grounds of affordability, rather than preference:

For us to buy a marine grade Colorbond ⁴ roof in our upgrades was going to be $15,000. You could have put in a non-marine grade, but we didn’t want to do that because I think it isn’t going to last with the sea salt. I think it had to be marine grade. We didn’t want to spend 15 grand extra on a Colorbond roof. I probably like them better, but again it’s all down to money.

Other economic rationales were at play in selecting materials for the coastal conditions. While walking around his backyard, Max pointed to fixtures in his outdoor patio that were already rusting. He discussed his strategy for managing this:

For instance, you can see that’s fallen off [a light fitting], but these light fittings—see that’s marine grade and it’s still rusted a bit. They’re two or three times the cost of a normal light. The same with that fan. That’s not a marine grade—and I’ve put that there on purpose. That was 250-300 dollars. Marine grade would be over 900 dollars. But I said, ‘You know what? If it lasts for two years, I’ll get a different one—a marine grade—when I can afford it’.

The second theme which emerged in interviews was choosing materials that reflected a coastal aesthetic. Installing ‘faux’-coastal materials was one way to comply with the aesthetic, but bypass the work required to sustain a needy surface. Daniel, who had designed his garden with a ‘tropical feel’ in mind, was vocal about the difficulties of growing plants in this microclimate. He pointed to a paved section of the garden as we walked around the backyard (Figure 2(a)): ‘Out there, we put in that additional slab. I didn’t want maintenance, so I’ve used timber-look tiles’. Similarly, Tom pointed to elements and particular materials in his house façade that matched the coastal landscape character. Wood panels were used to mimic weatherboard finishes, in a modern homage to a ‘fibro shack’ (cf. Shaw and Menday, 2013). The rest of the façade was made up of ‘timber-look’ tiles:

Also with the shorea, the timber [panels]. It’s more of a coastal sort of thing we thought. We’ve got the Hebel with the render on there, and the timber broke it up a bit… But the columns being the statement, the tile that we chose to put on there is more like a timber look.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

The streetscape at Greenhills Beach, exhibiting characteristic features of MPEs: formal streetscapes, uniform colours, and facades on houses showing the influence of the design guidelines (Source of the picture: Charles Gillon, April 2017).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Different forms of material selection in coastal homes. (a) Daniel’s backyard, with ‘timber-look’ tiles that stay true to the aesthetic, but not the work required to sustain it; (b) Claire’s backyard, with susceptible materials set up to selectively weather with the coastal conditions (Source of both pictures: Charles Gillon).

Exploring material selection and regimes of maintenance, repair, and replacement shows the differing terms on which the coastal conditions were both anticipated in house design, and then negotiated in everyday living. Coastal conditions and elements were implicated in homemaking in filtered, varied ways. Attention to materials revealed contested notions of what ‘coastal’ means: adopting materials that take shape with environmental processes, or taking a more defensive approach, installing durable materials to delay maintenance and allow the built structure of home to last longer. Regardless, the conditions made people work (for some, in shorter timeframes than expected) to uphold ideal home cultures, and perform idealised imaginaries of a coastal home.

Conclusion

Homemaking is always a more-than-human achievement. This paper has explored how more-than-human processes and practitioners are implicated in homemaking, and regimes of maintenance, repair, and replacement, through everyday routines of cleanliness and through decision-making surrounding building materials. Ideals of domestic space can employ rigid cultures of nature, stifling the lived realities of homemaking, and hiding difficulties, exertions, and costs. Here, residents displayed a range of strategies—economic rationalities and labour—for making home in a coastal environment, reflecting temporalities, budgets, and the priorities of prominent domestic imaginaries. In this case, coastal conditions as ‘architectural practitioners’ were both desired and undesired—their negotiation bringing contingent combinations of material investment and vigilant maintenance, selective entry of desired coastal conditions (for instance, a ‘weathered’ look), and reluctant endurance of those undesired (for instance, rusted house finishes). This impelled differing economic rationalities, based on material properties: robustness and porousness were both justifiably ‘coastal’ in the minds of residents.

A coastal location was a distinct example for showing how home is always a process, and how built forms are always ‘building events’ (Jacobs, 2006). The ‘entropic destiny’ of houses (Jacobs and Cairns, 2011) is sped up, in a context in which aesthetic display was paramount. The coastal context here is therefore more than mere context: the infusion of the coast challenges conventional theories of urbanisation, and pre-given ideals of modern coastal housing. Residential movement to the coast in Australia shows no sign of slowing (see Burnley and Murphy, 2004; Gurran and Blakely, 2007), compelling further scrutiny of the everyday, material experience of living by the coast. As MPEs gain popularity as a means of housing sprawling coastal populations, it is timely to consider how development beside the coast is built, and how the built environment in turn informs what ‘living on the coast’ means for residents in these places. Indeed, coastal communities are in a position of imminent—or current—threat from inundation and increased storm activity (Department of Climate Change, 2009). A paradoxical relationship is growing between coastal housing as a ‘safe’ investment in terms of housing price, but a risky option in light of forecasted sea level rise and the anticipated effects of anthropogenic climate change.

This case offers the basis to explore the realities and rationalities of living in other high amenity housing locations associated with seachange, treechange, and new housing developments. These locations have some notable specificities: first, the relative wealth of residents affords significant capacity to choose how they navigate the elements; and second, houses in MPEs are maintained under strict aesthetic regimes, where the design guidelines influence a very particular, high-end expression of houses with a ‘coastal landscape character’. Regardless, resident accounts demonstrate that in the context of coastal conditions, even brand new homes—as profiled in this paper—become a site of encounter and heightened negotiation. Rather than setting out to just build a robust home, regimes of maintenance, repair and replacement were inflected with a coastal aesthetic. Here, the work of sustaining the materials of a coastal house mixed with the process of making a coastal home. Understanding how these tropes influence the homemaking practices of new housing developments in high amenity locations—be it a ‘coastal’ house, or a ‘rural’ house, or a ‘bush/forest’ house—is important for two reasons. First, the tropes informing the aesthetic can work to erode the future built character of these places (see Gillon and Gibbs, 2018; Shaw and Menday, 2013). Second, there are implications for household sustainability. Vernacular regimes of individual homemaking—like choosing to maintain something, or jettison it—can have profound consequences when scaled up and scaled out; research on household practices ‘helps to understand not only where dualistic nature talk is entrenched, but where more-than-human ontologies are already comprehensible and practiced’ (Head and Gibson, 2012: 709). The sustainability consequences of frequent cycles of replacement, spurred on by the ‘character’ of the development, are especially acute for housing contexts with uniform design and implementation (see Dowling and Power, 2011).

This paper has illustrated how extending more-than-human homemaking to the socio-technical activities of housing brings together the lively components of the house and its materials (Edensor, 2011; Power, 2009b), with nonhumans as ‘architectural practitioners’ (Jacobs and Merriman, 2011). This expansion of practicing architecture gives an augmented focus to the varied skills and competences of human occupants (Carr and Gibson, 2016; Cox, 2016b) as always only attempts to filter, and grapple with, more-than-human homemaking. Laying bare the effort—human and more-than-human—of home as a process disrupts the performance of prominent domestic imaginaries. We conclude by impelling revised scrutiny towards dominant forms of ‘natural’ housing cultures.