Put the case of a city already short of hotel accommodation, this city being centrally situated in a country where the tourist trade is likely to expand.

Put the case of a city, a university city, which is short of accommodation for its students. The university is in the centre of the city and any land nearby is too valuable to put merely into lodgings and hostels which do not pay their way.

This is not Wellington alone, but also Copenhagen and Stockholm. It was in Scandinavia that somebody first put together the needs of students for the nine months of the academic year and the needs of tourists for the three months of the Summer Season and realised that they were complementary. A hotel might be built which is also a hostel, a hostel which was also a hotel. Moreover the tariff paid by the summer guests would subsidize the rent of students for the rest of the year. From the students' point of view it would mean obtaining first-class living quarters in private rooms for the normal rent of a flat. And the whole concern would even pay its way; not only would it return the maintenance costs but also the capital investment. For the university there was the relief of finding a way to lodge students who lived outside the city without committing a penny of university funds. Instead of going to wait upon the government, hat in hand, for a loan or a subsidy to build hostels at so many unrecoverable thousands of pounds per bed and finding in austere days previous little response, the university could put the proposition to private investors that they might raise a fine building for students as a civic venture — and get their money back.

Well it has been done in Scandinavia. Now, as a student or a tourist, you have the choice of living in the 'Domus and the Jerum in Stockholm, the Hotel Volrat Tham in Gotenberg, the Studentbergen Soga in Oslo, the Alrek in Bergen or, in Copenhagen, the Egmont, the Solbakken and Otto Monsteds Hotel Minerva. They have been variously financed. Some of them came originally from private foundations and trust funds. But in Amsterdam I visited a hostel in its last stages of construction, about to admit students for the first time at the beginning of the academic year in September, and it has been built, ten million Dutch guilders worth, with only such means as would be available in New Zealand. There is not a penny of government money in the building; to have awaited it would have meant postponing the project indefinitely. But the government agreed to stand guarantor to a third of the loan which meant that more favourable terms could be got by the non-profit organisation of three men which has been raising the money.

There are seven or eight storeys of the Casa Academica. It has a long gracious facade and a view from its hundreds of windows of all of the city of Amsterdam. It has a restaurant and a coffee bar on the ground floor which will be open to the public and will actually run at a profit all the year round, but where students may eat at reduced rates. The rooms upstairs impressed me most. They have been built along corridors, because corridors are economical, but each set of four doors has its own private bay which is wider than the rest of the corridor and separately lit. Inside there is a room or a unit of two rooms, self-contained, with its own "wet cell."

Sibelius and Silence

The furniture had been designed not to clutter; the divan was also the bed, the table was made to take a typewriter, the bookshelves could be adjusted along the woodwork panelling to take all the textbooks for Economics III in winter and pots of maidenhair fern in summer as desired. Above all the room had been built for privacy and the insulation of sound, so that there was a double layer of brick within the walls and a layer of wave plastic between the concrete and the floor tiles. The central heating was supplied by convectors which do not gurgle from room to room. Altogether it was possible to work in the most satisfactory silence while Sibelius was thundering next door. The final inspiration lay in the coating of the walls with stamoid, an elegant plastic wallpaper, which never shows drawing pin marks. I myself, jaded with the whole idea of hostels after nine years of residence in institutions of one sort or another, would have liked to live in such a room. The point of it all was not simply that in a place built also as a hostel, such ideal accommodation could be afforded. The accommodation Had to be of this standard before one could charge a high enough tariff to make the hotel economical in the first place. And the Casa Academica, built in contemporary style for light and privacy, could compete against any hotel of the same grade in the city.

I remembered in time that I was meant to be representing not only the people who like privacy unlimited, but also more gregarious souls. Where should they all meet? Well, said Mr Scheltema, they could meet in each other's rooms —hostel dwellers and flat dwellers had a way of doing that in any case. And then there was the restaurant. It was easier to sit down and get to the bottom of Berkeley around a table in the restaurant than at any university high table. But if you chose not to eat at the restaurant, you could still bring food downstairs and cook it in the nearest kitchen. There was a kitchen, with lockers and tables and chairs as well as stoves, to each twelve rooms. In default of a separate staircase it served as a sociological focus for a small group within the larger unit of the corridor.

Difficulties ? Well married students were a difficulty. If a married couple preferred to stay in the city for those three summer months it was not as easy for them as for a single student to find a temporary vacancy in someone else's flat. Still, if as I'd said, students were generally younger in New Zealand than in Holland and Denmark and a smaller proportion of them were married, perhaps there would be enough single students to fill up 300 rooms? I said that according to official estimates there would be enough to fill twice that number. As for conferences, they'd had to go north for lack of room in the capital city.

"Well," said he, "I'd capitalise on that. You see, it works. The whole thing. Why don't you try one yourself in Wellington? A Casa Academica."

Then I asked, knowing I was being unreasonable—what about the Concept of a Hall of Residence? Any university community according to our ideal should include staff as well as students. To ask for this on top of all the rest! Especially when in New Zealand, though this had been our ideal all along, we had managed to achieve it in only one or two cases, and only then if the staff resigned themselves to becoming wardens.

From Denmark

Mr Scheltema had anticipated me even here. The idea behind the Casa Academica had come in the first place from Denmark. At the Hotel Egmont in Copenhagen which is actually run under the university council, one of the professors lives with his family in a bungalow within the grounds and he spends an hour or two each day at Egmont on call to students as part of his job. The university in Amsterdam might decide to have the same arrangement here. But professor or no professor, certainly the hostel would have its junior and unmarried staff members. They would live here on the same terms as everybody else as part of the intellectual community without having to become wardens or house tutors or anything functionary. The conditions were attractive enough to keep senior students and staff members where they would have left other hostels as soon as they had enough money to keep a flat. On behalf of senior students and junior staff, I agreed profoundly.

"Well then," said he, "on the seventh of November or whatever date you choose, in an instant the whole thing becomes a hotel. You have say 300 rooms (it's not economical to build less). Each of these rooms has a divan which can be unfolded as a single bed or a double bed. Your total capacity is 600 with the added advantage that each of your rooms is potentially either a single room or double room as you need it, and that each set of two rooms has been built to serve either as two separate rooms or as a suite, the divan in one room being turned into a bed and in the other kept as it is. No team of furniture-removers to stack and unstack 300 iron bed frames each year.

"The kitchens on each floor are stored with the goods of the students who won't be needing them till March. (It's an advantage of this hostel over any flat that a student has security of tenure into the next year without having to pay for the three months when he wants to be away). The shop downstairs which yesterday sold bread and milk, now sells postcards and souvenir jewellery; the room which held exhibitions by industry offering jobs to graduates, now becomes a creche; the seating accommodation for meals is boosted by the addition of the breakfast room which up till then has been used by the restaurant contractor to cater for wedding parties and Law Club dinners. Best of all, you have a staff at hand—all the students who want to stay on and earn money. And the man who was merely business manager under the professor, blossoms into a proper hotel manager. Simple altogether!"

"Just a little undordono, please."

The Problem of Sites

Then, scrambling down fire escapes and through the breakfast room and along the terraces, Mr Scheltema and I discussed the essential ingredients of the scheme. Firstly a central site—because tourists find it handier this way. And if you were going to let out the hotel to a conference you need halls, preferably university halls, nearby. But perhaps we were lucky enough in my city at home to have the university in the centre of the city anyway? It was so! What could be better? And if the site was central, especially if it had a view, your restaurant could compete with all the others in town. (It was almost an advantage, by the way, Not to use any government money — one's commercial enterprise could run unfettered.) Money was another ingredient. As for that couldn't we tap for loans, say the farming community which sent its sons and daughters to the university anyway and would appreciate first option on rooms in the holiday season?