Originating on the English downlands in the 19th Century, shepherd huts served as the shepherd's home during lambing time. It was a solitary 24 hour a day job, with the hut often two miles or more from the farmhouse. Shepherd huts had a characteristic design of curved corrugated iron roof and wooden walls with steps leading to a door at one end typically with wheels allowing easy relocation. As well as keeping them from harm, concentrating the sheep in a fold increased the fertility of the land and got it ready for a spring sown fodder crop.

Shepherd huts locally were permanent structures on high country runs, serving as a base for the shepherds charged with confining sheep within unfenced boundaries. The more traditional wheeled variety was reinvented to suit working life at the time, including roadmen's huts, 'stinky' accommodation for harvest labourers and accommodation for contract horse ploughmen in Canterbury and North Otago. The railways used a similar design for single working men's accommodation, featuring a curved corrugated iron roof, small stove and chimney mounted on a rail wagon and finished in typical railway cream and red colours.

The modern day interpretation of a shepherd's hut is popular for everything from a sleep out, artist studio or garden retreat to the more serious business of a home office or duck hunter's hut. Individually crafted with cast iron wheels and a distinctive curved roof, the huts combine aesthetic appeal with portability and are designed to be comfortably at home in the modern day backyard. The crème de la crème artist's studio model is fitted with side French doors, solid tongue and groove wooden flooring, insulation and natural macrocarpa panelling. Resene Environmental Choice products are used throughout the finished huts for an environmentally preferable and sustainable finish.

The appeal of the traditional combined with the practicality of today, these shepherd huts are minding backyards all over the country.

Supplier: The Shepherds Hut Company
From the Resene News – issue 3/2007