James Beard on a life well-lived
Wainui resident and architect Jim Beard. Photo: Ina Holst.
James (Jim) Beard’s home perches on a rocky cliff against a backdrop of endless ocean and horizon.
Here at Wainui, accompanied by his wife Inna, the award-winning architect from Wellington finds rest and seclusion from the hustle and bustle of city life. The couple’s multilevel house is nestled on a headland of 50 hectares of regenerated bush which, almost in its entirety, has been put into a charitable trust—the James Beard Environment Trust—and under QEII protection.
At the age of 86, Jim can reflect on a fulfilled professional and personal life, and his four children and six grandchildren. At a “tender age”, Jim moved with his family from Christchurch to Wellington, where he spent his formative years.
He fondly remembers his exploration in the New Zealand backcountry with his father, a keen fisherman. His early explorations of the bush behind their Karori home also contributed to his enthusiasm and concern for the natural environment.
“My father taught me a lot; he was very conscious of the beauty of nature. He was always exploring. Mum was more of a homebody. We had a caravan and would always make friends with the farmers and be invited to these huge lunches,” Jim reminisces. He followed in his father’s footsteps. Driven by inquisitiveness he explored the countryside and eventually discovered Golden Bay.
“I came down here for the first time 40 years ago. By then it was the only area I had not been to in New Zealand. I had been right through the whole country except to northwest Nelson, and I only came here at the request of a close friend who had found a beautiful piece of land he wanted to buy at Parapara. Well, he did not get it, he missed out, but he had introduced me to this area and I thought, this is the best part of New Zealand, it’s got everything. It is rich in botany, zoology and geology and is more than unique, and, as I discovered later, the social mix was fantastic as well.”
He set his mind on purchasing a piece of land and made contact with a land agent who sold him the Wainui promontory. Once access had been bulldozed to a flat piece of land above the pounding sea, the construction of what he calls the “Vile house” began—a prefabricated bach by Vile Constructions.
“I went over my maximum price of what I could afford, but we finally agreed on a figure and we signed over the 50 hectares of farmland and the farmer took the stock off. It was very little stock the poor land could support. Most of the good soil had already gone into the Tasman Sea, and the gorse and bracken came up rapidly among the clumps of native bush, mainly kanuka, and on the eastern side of the Abel Tasman point, a stand of beech was clinging to the cliff face,” muses Jim. “Hell, I thought at the time, this is so isolated. There was only very little development in Tata at the time.”
With an acute interest in politics and environmental issues, Jim fought quite a few cases of interest to him throughout New Zealand and in Golden Bay—among them plans for a pedestrian-only area in Takaka township in 1995.
“This little scheme allowed parking in Commercial Street with bollards to let the traffic come in from the north or south, but motor vehicles had to back out the same way to make connections to the bypasses to the west and east and it did not allow any through traffic. The idea came down like a lead balloon with a thud. It did not have the support of shopkeepers, who feared they would lose business, but it could have been easily done with some political will behind it.”
At a local level, he became involved in the restoration of the museum and the post office in Takaka and tried to save the Anglican Church from being “mutilated” with plaster and corrugated iron.
“It [the church] is a shocker to look at. The renovation shows no understanding of the history, the interior and the uniqueness of the construction,” said Jim, who once served as a chairman of the Historic Places Trust.
“There has been a lot of change in the Bay. It just happens and sometimes people take no responsibility for the environment and are building almost anywhere.”
Strongly inspired by the works of authors like Tolstoy, Rousseau and Ruskin, Jim believes that although “somewhat utopian, they are all saying the right thing, and even then they were aware of ecological issues. Tolstoy in particular talked about the ‘god of nature’ and that’s at the heart of the matter.”
In architectural design, Jim believes there is a balance of rightness and whether things fit well together. “Again, if we go back to nature we find the same relationships between design and function. Decorative forms are a result of function and structural integrity. In a tree, for example, the form of the tree, the roots and the branches together follow certain functions, and together with the tree’s structure of these elements this results in good design created as a result of evolution.”
During his working life, Jim has played significant roles as a Wellington architect, town planner and landscape architect. After his architectural training at Auckland University he was employed by the Ministry of Works. In the early fifties, he received a scholarship and attended MIT in Boston to study city planning, then went on to Harvard University to study for a Masters in Landscape Architecture.
Back in New Zealand in the 1960s he co-founded Gabites and Beard Registered Architects and Town Planning Consultants in Wellington and played an active role in shaping New Zealand’s architecture by applying his skills. He was one of the few qualified town planners in New Zealand in the 1950s and 1960s: a field, which he says was—and to some extent still is—non-existent in New Zealand.
Jim is probably best known for the restoration of the Katherine Mansfield birthplace in Thorndon, his work on the design of the Hannah Playhouse (Downstage) in 1973, and the PSIS Investment House in 1976. He is also responsible for the design of the brass plaques set into the pavement throughout the Wellington CBD showing the shoreline before and after the 1850 earthquake.
He has also taught architecture at Auckland University, Wellington Technical College, Wellington Polytechnic and Victoria University of Wellington.
Before their return to Wellington, Inna and Jim spend the last few Golden Bay days saying goodbyes to lots of old friends. While Jim casts a look around his library, which contains “any book and publication ever written about northwest Nelson, in alphabetical order”, he comments that his life has been an “enjoyable ride which has had a few bumps, but one cannot have any regrets.”
Ina Holst
