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Kōrero: Taranaki region

Beehive house, 1957

Edgar Roy Brewster shows visitors around his beehive house, in which all design elements were hexagonal, and even a print of the 'Mona Lisa' hung in a six-sided frame. Brewster built the house at Sanders Avenue, New Plymouth, in 1947, and over the next two decades it hosted more than a quarter of a million visitors. The house was called Norian, a name based on the phrase 'no right angles'. Brewster dismantled the building in 1966 after selling the land on which it was sited. 

Te whakamahi i tēnei tūemi

Archives New Zealand - Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga

Reference: Pictorial Parade 67. National Film Unit, 1957

Permission of Archives New Zealand Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga must be obtained before any re-use of this material.

Ngā whakaahua me ngā rauemi katoa o tēnei kōrero

Me pēnei te tohu i te whārang

Ron Lambert, Taranaki region – Arts and heritage, Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, https://teara.govt.nz/mi/video/25350/beehive-house-1957 (accessed 4 June 2026).

He kōrero nā Ron Lambert, i tāngia i te 23 February 2010, updated 1 August 2015.

Comments

David Flanagan
26 October 2013
I remember my Father taking me to see this amazing house, many years ago, it was an amazing thing to see because everything including the furniture was shaped like a hexagon. The thought and the time spent to build this was unimaginable. I was born in New Plymouth 1947 and to this day, I still call it home. Back in the 70's I had a girlfriend in Waitara and asked her about this house, but she had never heard of it, until her Father told her that it did exist and was now in storage. I would truly love to see it again and show it to my children, so if it is in storage, lets get it out and show this wonder off to the world.
Douglas J. Mecham
16 May 2012
I wanted to see the special "Beehive" House. Mr E. Roy Bruster invited me in for tea and began to talk about his house, its concept, his ideas, how he wrote to Boeing, telling them how they should build the internal structure in the wings. His spontaneous conversation was quite one-sided about his "principles". "Truth - laws of shape, the compression of a circle to a hexagon"; "Love - governs laws of attraction, the creative force of work"; "Light - knowledge, the energy". "There are three things that make up the hexagon: the control or center point, the moving points, and motion". We have the moving point in motion about the center point, progress in cycle". "God, of course, is the center point which is the absolute truth - the control point." "We began with strength (men or beauty/women) and progress to relative truth and live respectively from which one goes into perfection and harmony respectively (the third) with the world." "Truth is a balance." "Independence, a single man or woman (not married or devoted to the religious ministerial marriage with Christ has not accepted the center point as the center point of control - for them there is no cycle, just a straight line, i.e. moving between two points and thus a divergence or tension; this is an error. "Principals = truth." "Three points for man and three points for women make up the hexagon." "Attributes for man are useful for women who are beautiful" The hexagon is a simple strong form of triangles that form his whole house, but he still had a flat roof ... the geodesic dome had not become popular yet. He then expanded upon his theories of aerodynamics and showed me letters (over 8 pages worth) written to Boeing telling them why their Boeing 707 aircraft were crashing. Because they were not taking into account the central force and hexagonal aspects of life. Second, because the air siphon accesses the wing was wrong because they forgot to account for the air when forced up comes down again on the rear of the wing and the air passing through the space between." Thus he could also explain the sound barrier via his reasoning the air crashes were when near electrical strikes due to the thunder wave. So Mr Brewster told me in November 1967. [Doug Mecham, world traveler from USA hitching about NZ. These notes created from hand written notes of the time. 20120511]