How Kiwi Live: Robin Allison of Earthsong

Cozy, relaxed. And also clean in the ecological sense, it’s made of natural materials. There are a lot of meaningful objects from my family.

It's a place where I can relax and be me. Where I feel like I can expand my presence into the space.

My home was one of the first 17 houses built as Stage I of Earthsong. I was the development coordinator and while it was being built I was living in the old house on site. As part of my role I would visit pretty much every house every day in the process of construction. And then after hours when the builders had left, I would often wander around the site just to get a feeling of what it would be like.

I kept finding myself coming back to this place where my home is. It's in the middle of our community now that all the houses are built. We have a figure eight path and my house is right by the crossover in the figure 8. It was the place that I was emotionally drawn to.

I'm proud of the fact that we got it built in the first place. It was a huge project. It took eight years to build the whole of Earthsong and 5 years planning it before that, so it's taken a big chunk of my life, which has been the most amazing thing to have been doing. I'm just really proud still of how important that is, not just for us who live here but for demonstrating what's possible and trying to encourage people to use natural materials and sustainable, low energy [things like] solar power, all of those things.

My partner and I start the day with a cup of tea in bed. Then I collect my newspaper from outside the common house where our letterboxes are. I come back and make breakfast and have a cup of coffee.

I guess it's the couch that I normally sit on in our living room. It's got good lighting so if I'm doing something crafty or reading, it's good, it's comfortable. It’s sort of tucked into a corner with a view of the whole rest of the downstairs. I'm a knitter. I do quite creative Kaffe Fassett designs. It's a way of combining colored wools so you use 100 different scraps of different wool and weave them into these beautiful patterns.

I have to say my grandmother clock. I have this enormous clock which just tucks in under the ceiling actually, it was sort of perfect. It's very intricately carved and my great grandmother carved it and my great grandfather was a clockmaker/jeweler and he made the workings of it. It was in my grandmother's house when I was tiny and I grew up with that clock. Now it's come to me and I've got it going for the first time in 60 years. It's beautiful. I was actually really worried that it was going to be too loud and dominate and that it would just drive us crazy, but it’s a beautiful, soft, sort of throaty deep chime. Sometimes I crouch down to look up at it because it's most familiar to me from [my] two-year-old point [of view].

I guess it's when I have family around. We haven't entertained as much as we'd like to for a while. But we do pull the table out into the space and have family gatherings. I've got two little grandsons now and we've got four adult sons between us and their partners, so that’s quite a number.

I've been here 22 years now so there's been lots of good memories in this house. One of them would be having Christmas lunch outside at our long macrocarpa table under the grapevine which at Christmas time is full of leaves and is shady and cool from the bright sun. Just being out in the garden and having that space to have a family gathering. It feels like what you see in Italian movies, you see them all gathering under the grapevine, you know, and having big family occasions.

Learn more about Robin Allison here.