SUSTAINABLE SHEDDING
Retired landscaper, Fred Frederikse, lives a semi-hippy lifestyle with wife, Deb, in pole sheds beside the Whanganui River. Fred and friends have built the sheds, including a recording studio where he plays in a band.
A largely self-taught builder and self-confessed “dropout from the School of Architecture”, Fred works out of his head, without plans. He says he learned about building by demolishing a house, and as a landscaper built anything from fences to decks, to retaining walls, to fountains and waterfalls, to lighting systems.
“The next thing you build is always different so you learn as you go. I’m not a conventional builder,” he explains.
Fred and Deb used to live much further up the Whanganui River.
“[We] lucked into a piece of land and built up there. There was no power and we lived for three years in a geodesic dome with a wood stove, but I think square walls are much more sensible than geodesic so I decided to live in a house.”
Demo timber
Fred built their next house from scratch in the 1970s, at Atene, further up river, using demolition timber and a large, ornate window he salvaged from Villa Maria, a Catholic boarding school, originally called Hutchison’s Folly after its previous owner and built in 1876. The land is now the site of St Mary’s Church in Whanganui. The outside dunny he made then was the beginning of what is
