Speaker 9: 0:00

Our kids are getting bigger and they want more space, and we want a bit more space from them. So we are going to build ourselves a little bedroom cabin. And it will be modeled on an SF 70.

Jonty: 0:20

Kiro and welcome to the Tramping Life, a podcast about hiking in outro New Zealand, or as we call it here, tramping. I'm jt, and in each episode I chat with people who share passion for exploring this incredible country. We'll hear about the tracks they love, the huts they return to, the lessons they've learned, and what keeps them heading back into the bush. My guests today are Kimmy and Nico. From designing mini huts and public art projects to curating unique backcountry infrastructure, Kimmy and Nico combined creativity, outdoors experience, and community spirit in everything they do. I'm delighted to welcome'em to the podcast I'd like to start at the beginning. What are your earliest memories of being outdoors?

Kimi: 1:00

I grew up on the Wild West coast. So I have a lot of memories hanging out, down at the Truman Track at the Secret Beaches, up the Fox River. And then I went to a really great school where they prioritized outdoor education, so we did a lot of tramping in the Tara.

Niko: 1:17

I traveled a lot around the south island with my mom. She had a house bus or a house truck I just remember turning up at any old road end and getting out in the bush

Jonty: 1:28

your families were both outdoorsy and they encouraged you to do the same?

Speaker 9: 1:32

Yeah, definitely. And a lot of day trips and just exploring. But then, yeah, as we got older, doing more actual tramping out to huts.

Speaker 4: 1:41

Do you remember your first multi-day tramp?

Speaker 9: 1:43

I just did a multi-day tramp with some of my friends, and I think it might be my first, have we done a multi-day together? We usually just do overnighters.

Speaker 12: 1:53

We've got kids ever since we've had the freedom to get out there with the vehicle. We've also had kids, so we've made the trance relatively easy, but we want to get into more challenging things. However, my first memory was when I was about 14. Just me and my mates went into able Tasman and that was really cool'cause there's no adults around. And it was the middle of summer and we had a great time.

Jonty: 2:15

And then what sort of trance have you taken the kids on?

Kimi: 2:17

We love to just find huts that are, within walking distance for small legs. One of our favorites that we did recently was Chaffee Hut in the Cobb Valley. Which is like an hour and a half drive down the dirt road, which is an adventure in itself. But then the walkin is only two hours signposted, I think it took us two and a half, along, the flats mostly along a stream. Chaffee Hut is an awesome hut. We made it as a mini hut and then brought it along to the real hut. And the hut itself is like an artwork. It's been handmade twice because the original guy made it. And then they restored it faithfully and it's only three bunk. It's like the most characterful little hut. So that was an awesome experience too. He had the hut to ourselves.

Speaker 4: 3:06

So the kids are

Jonty: 3:07

keen, are they look forward to the next trip or is there a little bit of encouragement required?

Speaker 9: 3:11

No, they love it. they're always encouraging us, when do we go into a hut?

Speaker 12: 3:15

They can't wait to get to the hut. They love it once they get there and have a great time.

Speaker 9: 3:20

We've found it's much easier to get them out into the bush if there's a hut to go to. I think a day walk doesn't keep their interest as much. Whereas if there's a hut to get to, then you get to stay the night and have lollies and treats and light a fire

Jonty: 3:34

trips you recommend with kids, I guess in the wellton region, if somebody asked you for your top tips?

Speaker 9: 3:39

we stayed at part Hut the other day with the whole family. The youngest was three, so that's obviously super easy. It's only like a 10 minute hike. But then you get to explore, from the hut, down to the river

Speaker 4: 3:54

Have you had any disasters or issues

Speaker 12: 3:56

with, no, not really. The snow came down once before we got to the hut and it started really blowing down

Speaker 9: 4:04

We were trying to get to Blythe Hut and we stayed in Lupton cause it was slightly closer and we were realizing that the weather was closing and it was getting dark.

Speaker 12: 4:11

It had been fine the entire time. And then as we're getting close to the hut, this sleet hail kind of thing came down and it got quite scary'cause the little one was still quite small. Oh, we're just gonna crash in the first hut, even though it was a huge distance between them, it was getting late.

Speaker 9: 4:27

And it was so cozy. We were like, that was our first kind of winter tramp with the kids in snow and we were over prepared. And then we got the fire raging and we were all too hot in the end.

Jonty: 4:38

I think that's the only hu I've been to, which had carpet on the floor.

Speaker 9: 4:41

Yeah. Classic carpet. we love that house. It was built by the high school kids, right? From Wie High School, I think, which is awesome.

Jonty: 4:50

Maybe you could describe to listeners what you do?

Speaker 9: 4:52

we started doing art together in 2012, in Wellington. We flattered together and had a cafe job and we were like broke artists, like just graduated outta uni. Super enthusiastic to just make art and urban explore because we didn't have a car back then. So we took a lot advantage of just exploring the green spaces around Wellington. And then bringing stuff home from the cafe job, like the corrugated cans, the big tin cans. And obviously being HU enthusiasts, we realized, oh, that's miniature corrugated iron. And so we experimented by making heaps of different stuff. And then we got our first paid contract from the Wellington City Council from the Public art fund. That was 2014. And we had a really great arts advisor there. our pitch was that we would gather materials from the streets and then make art and put art in the green space. And she thought, oh, wouldn't it be great if you had a bit more of a theme and shelter from the storm had just come out? We took that book and basically. We had seven sites. And so we chose a chapter from each from that book, of the different types of huts, and made a hut inspired by those different themes and put them out in the bush. And people just loved it. Each one had a log book and we just got so much great feedback.

Jonty: 6:12

So how large were those huts you made the first time

Speaker 9: 6:15

So they varied. Some of them were mini hut size.

Speaker 12: 6:18

They would go from mini hut size all the way up to roughly the size of a two person bench. it'd be like a covered little bench. two adults could sit inside it with the doors wide open and look at the view. So that was the largest.

Speaker 11: 6:30

Yeah,

Speaker 9: 6:31

So they can fit in your hand. Those huts actually went missing because we tried to attach them to the rocks down at T Bay in well, and, people got

Speaker 12: 6:39

we had to restock that place two or three times'cause People kept stealing the little mini heart, so they were anchored to the rock. The larger ones survived a lot better. And the largest one was up for three years before this relentless vandalism from one person, we think forced us to think, oh, it's time to take it down. But it survived three years. Loved. And people would go up to it probably every day.

Jonty: 7:01

So given the amount of theft, clearly there was demand

Speaker 9: 7:04

There was obviously people were keen to have a hut in their house, on their shelves, And then so when COVID hit, we'd just done another major project for the New Zealand Arts Festival where we did five Hearts up the Katy Coast. And most of those were big enough that you could sit inside. And then lockdown started the day after our last event, and we moved up to the Waikato and had been wanting to pursue making mini huts because we had a really great relationship with the store down in Littleton Henry Trading. And she had been selling the mini huts for us whenever we have time to make them. Now we do one a month, and do a batch and release them through our mail list, and yeah, it's going really well.

Jonty: 7:43

What work is involved in making a mini hunt?

Speaker 12: 7:45

First off, you've gotta collect all the materials so everything's salvaged. And we get large tin cans from a local catering business. They go through a lot of large tin cans and building wood from the building industry. We have a bit of contact with the developer and we can just collect their off cuts and stuff. They saved them for us. And then from there they need to be prepped into a usable format. So there's a whole process for the cans and the wood. I actually hire a teenager to do some of the grunt work. A little apprentice.

Speaker 9: 8:16

Then we've made like a bunch of jigs and stuff because there's a lot of processes that you're repeating.'cause we make a batch of either 30 or 60. And Kimmi, really loves to make little jigs and machines,

Speaker 12: 8:28

so I've made a whole lot of, little jigs that do a specific job just for each part. So it's a factory process. It's part handmade, but it's all stamped out. It's all made by hand. All the machines are handmade. I don't really use any computers. We don't have any of that stuff here.

Jonty: 8:43

And you're inspired by, huts, you visited yourself and then finding photographs of other huts.

Speaker 9: 8:48

Yeah, the research part is a big part of the process. At the start of the year, we try and come up with a list of the huts that we're gonna do that year, and I do lots of research and make a little hut card. So every hut comes with a little map and some info about the hut on there, which is slid inside the chimney. The Hut books are amazing. Sheltered from the Storm, all of the, hot and Burton books, Sean Barnett's books, and then great websites like Hot Bagger. and then people like on social media or on a mailing list, they'll let us know what huts they wanted us to make. this year we really tried to focus in on the SF 70 style six bunk hut from the deer curling days. And tried to standardize it because there's so many of those around the country and they've all got great different color schemes. so that's been really fun to just play with the colors and, different individual stories behind each because obviously they were all made, by people in different areas.

Speaker 12: 9:46

By focusing on the SF 70 for a little while, I've been able to make a lot of custom tools that are specific to that model, which it's a lot of work to make one of these tools. It could take a few days, and a lot of them need to be made. So I've got lots of catching up to do. But, it was great to be able to focus on just this sort of one-liner tools to get this one sort of hut through a bit faster because it's a hell of a lot of work. And, as you can imagine, there's not a lot of money. We get by fine, but, trying to manufacture and sell art in New Zealand is, a huge challenge. Trying to make it as efficient as possible,

Speaker 9: 10:21

yeah, there's a lot of steps like when you think of like ceramicists have one material and they mold it and they fire it, and that's a lot as well. Metal and tin, and then, you've gotta file the metal and make it not sharp.

Speaker 12: 10:34

We try to make them as high quality as we can. There's no little bits that your finger's are gonna catch on the tin. Like I said, it's a hell of a lot of work. I've had people be like, oh, why do they cost so much? It's just a bit of tin smacked onto a piece of wood,

Speaker 4: 10:48

what's been the most

Jonty: 10:49

difficult hut to build?

Speaker 12: 10:51

Chaffee I guess the prices of the hearts will stay the same, but some of them take, quite a lot more work the Chaffy hut had these little bits on the side and each little weatherboard had to be put through the machine individually, and it was a lot of work. Hundreds of actions. Thousands.

Speaker 9: 11:07

Yeah, that one's a special one. And we love Chaffy, so we're gonna try and do it again, but at a slightly larger scale because the great thing about Chappy Hut is that the foundation is massive rocks. Including the stairs. And so we'd really love to incorporate the rocks into it. But because our whole ethos is about using real materials, like we don't call our huts model huts because modelers will use, plastic or bol wood or different kind of things to make it. But we use the real materials that the huts are actually made of steel and wood. So when we wanna do chappy hut with the rocks in it, we wanna use real rocks, which is, quite a challenge. We've been trying to figure that one out.

Speaker 4: 11:45

Have you ever done interiors

Speaker 12: 11:46

so the larger huts, which we call bigots, some of those have interiors. it's whether or not it's worth it really because there's so much work already going into the outside. and you question like, why am I doing the inside? because no one can afford them and, we end up just keeping them.

Speaker 9: 12:03

We did do one of our first mini huts was in that project I was telling you about in Wellington, down in Alfredo Bay, Robin Hut, it was this little orange hut up underneath the old quarry in bay. And it had two windows, and you could look inside and we like made the bunks and the fireplace and like stuff on the table like that was super detailed and that was awesome. But yeah, now we tend to focus on the outsides.

Speaker 4: 12:26

I saw you made a bigot show

Jonty: 12:27

of, was that field hut for Taylor Tramping Club. Centenary.

Speaker 12: 12:31

The centenary of Field Hut. Yes. 100 years. And we made a large one. It's probably about 45 centimeters square, roughly. Yeah, they won a lot of detail glass in the windows, the door latch really works and all that sort of stuff.

Speaker 9: 12:45

Yeah. Because there are only a couple of photos of the hut as it was originally built. And so we decoded the photos and it was really amazing to be able to bring that to life. And using different like replicating the processes of the real hut builders. So all of the corrugated iron on that hut is cut to the same length because that was the length that they could put on the pack course.

Speaker 12: 13:06

So we've got on the model, every little bit of turn is the exact same size because everyone was rolled up and carried up the hill that same size.

Speaker 9: 13:14

And obviously one of the windows must have broken on the way up as well because all the windows are the exact same size. But one of the windows you can see in the photo has been boarded up. So we thought that must have broken on the way, and they just boarded it up and then brought another one in later. So on our model, we've got the boarded up, window, which is my favorite bit.

Speaker 12: 13:32

What about the chimney? The chimney's pretty epic. They don't make chimneys like this anymore. It's quite unique to New Zealand. So I think the example on Field hut miniature is a good sort of bygone bit of culture,

Speaker 4: 13:44

and who buys your minis?

Speaker 9: 13:46

People that love huts, hut, enthusiasts. I think there's a lot of hot bagger. There's a few different interesting segments of our audience.'cause I think there's the older generation or people buying for their dad who was a dear color, for example. And then there's also younger people like us who are into design. Appreciate the minimalist, aspect of it. We've just got a dedicated mainly list that we send out every month and they buy the huts. I think half of the people each month are regular collectors and then half are new people.

Speaker 4: 14:21

Tell me about Urban Hut Club?

Speaker 9: 14:23

So that was a project that we did in 20 19, 20 20. We had decided after living 10 years in Wellington in this amazing old villa with an amazing landlord that didn't charge us much rent. We decided that we were gonna. Moved back to the West coast.'cause I'd always wanted to live on the West coast again after growing up there. And so we decided we were gonna leave. We picked up everything and then just as we were leaving, we happened to run into Brett McKenzie on the street. And we had some of our art in the car and the book of that first hut project that we'd done. And so I was like, oh, I'm gonna go and fan girl him and so we gave him some of our art. He looked at the book and he goes, oh, I've been looking for you. And it turns out he had done the walks to the huts with his kids and loved it. And the New Zealand Festival of the Arts had contacted him and asked him to be a guest curator and to pick some art projects to fund for the festival. And that they couldn't find out who we were. He had no idea who we were. The festival were amazing. They funded us really well, we did these five huts, so we worked with five reserve groups up the Kaari coast. we really love working with people with boots on the ground. They know that area, they look after it. And so we gathered the materials from within that community and talk to them about their values and then designed a heart specifically for each one. Then we also worked with amazing authors. Chris McLean was one. They each wrote a short story for the hut, so that when you went to the hut you could sit down and read the short story. And that was a dream project, and we are hoping to do another version of that down in Queenstown.

Jonty: 16:01

Could you have imagined any of this when you first started? Like you, there's a lot of opportunities have come about from building mincha hus

Speaker 9: 16:07

it's interesting because when we first started, we were dedicated to making a living from our art. We knew that if we could team up, we. Use our skills together that eventually we're better to make a living. we were very surprised that it happened earlier than we, I dunno if we expected it to happen earlier or not, but it's been awesome. But I think it just shows the dedication of sticking with something, not giving up. And also we've being able to live very cheaply, like

Speaker 12: 16:35

We knew each other as students and as broke artists out uni and we had so many ways of. Getting resources outside of a financial system or alleviating financial pressures in some way. Working outside of the system but to still get by within it. And you gotta do that as an artist.

Speaker 9: 16:55

We've just followed what we love. We love huts and we've just gotta drive to really create something and obviously people really need it. Like it sounds silly to me, like people need mini huts, but it is touching on. Something that is not really being served within. Like you can buy a book or you can get your photos framed but having this physical, tangible object, that can put your memories into is really amazing and people really value that,

Jonty: 17:22

did I read somewhere that you're building a tiny home yourself?

Speaker 9: 17:25

So we've built our tiny house. We are living in it. It's not finished. we moved in before it was finished. So we keep adding to it and that's the same ethos. We just find materials and we've got time, because we're not, tied to a salary, so we can. build, and it's a really amazing process actually being able to build as you live in something because you realize what it is that you need. That's what we love about It's like you're totally stripped back to just shelter, water, heat

Speaker 4: 17:54

Is it hut inspired? Does it have a tin roof?

Speaker 9: 17:57

Yep. It's completely covered in corrugated iron. Its colors are orange and green. We love orange. we use like really nice timber that we find like kiwi made all of the windows out of Remu, and salvage glass which are definitely the star of the show.

Speaker 4: 18:13

Maybe there's

Jonty: 18:14

opportunity to build tiny home huts.

Speaker 9: 18:16

Actually we have had an idea because our kids are getting bigger and they want more space, and we want a bit more space from them. So we are going to build ourselves a little bedroom cabin. And it will be modeled on an SF 70.

Speaker 12: 18:33

it's more like a giant mini hut. 70

Jonty: 18:36

a trumping journal. What's the idea there?

Speaker 9: 18:38

That's my little pet project. Every year we keep things interesting by trying out a new thing. Kemi gets to build his, experimental bigger huts. When we first did those huts in the wild, they always had hut books in there and they would just blank pages and they would fill up with amazing poetry and sketches and interactions. And we really miss that with these mini hats. We don't really get to interact. That level with, paper and pen anymore. I did a call out to people to send me their sketches. So what I've come up with is it's basically a mini doc intentions book. but I've rewritten the intro pages. Talking about creativity, how you are creative when you're out in the bush and like drawing games. And then it's got blank pages for you to fill in. And then it's got some examples as well of ones that people have sent in. So I'm really excited about it. It's gonna be released in November and it's gonna be an affordable,$26 hopefully. I think it's gonna be a good gift for Christmas. We've got another project coming out this year before Christmas as well, which is T-shirts. It's the first time that we're doing t-shirts and we're doing a collaboration with the Hot Bagger team. So it's a really awesome t-shirt. It's got an amazing illustration. We've worked with Daniel Foot, who's an illustrator, and it's a pack with mini Hut spilling out it, and it's got heaps of details. Really cool. So I'm really excited to share that for the real hut enthusiasts out there.

Jonty: 20:03

I feel could be a shelter from the storm book, but with the miniatures rather than the photos of the originals.

Speaker 9: 20:10

we've been trying to convince Robbie and Craig, we, have a great relationship with them. They're really awesome. one day, hopefully that'll happen.

Speaker 12: 20:16

Yeah, we need to make a lot more mini huts to really fill it out. and the bigger huts too. Got so many ideas, just finding the time to do it all, but eventually be a great coffee book, I'm sure.

Jonty: 20:27

So what's in your bucket list of, the two bucket list? One of, model mini huts to build and the other is

Speaker 4: 20:33

actual huts to visit.

Speaker 12: 20:35

there's a long list of huts I want to do. I'd like to do a large one of Jack's heart, which is just right on the highway on Arthur's Pass it's not actually a tramping hut. It's owned by Doc. It was never a tramping hut. It was a road man's house and then it was a batch. Dot owns it. It looks like a old hut, but it's not in my mind, but I really love it. It looks beautiful. so I wanna do that one. working up to making a large one looking straight at it rather than a full on 3D kind like squash view. So it's still built but you can hang it on the wall, it's still 3D

Speaker 9: 21:13

and then in terms of tramping to huts we really wanna get up to the hut on Mount wrong air. That's one of our local, sites. It hasn't got a fireplace though, so that's been putting us off cause we really love finding fire. but maybe this summer we'll manage to do that with the girls.

Speaker: 21:29

Thank you so much for listening to the Tramping life. If you've enjoyed today's episode, please follow the podcast in whatever app you use. Tell a friend about it and consider leaving a rating or a review. It really helps more people discover the show. you have any questions or feedback, I'd love to hear from you. Drop me an email at the tramping life, one word@gmail.com.