I’ll skip the several months we spent checking out houses in other localities and cut to the Sunday afternoon when we found ourselves idly looking in Masterton real estate agents’ windows and discovered something about Masterton that we’d never known.

Masterton is a place most people drive through to get somewhere else. That means they don’t deviate from the main drag. But if they did, they would learn that Masterton is full of gracious, imposing houses dating back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Most have big gardens and glorious old trees.

What’s more, the sections are flat. You don’t have to wear crampons to mow the lawns.

These homes, mostly on the town’s fashionable west side, date back to an era when Masterton was the centre of a very rich farming district. Many were built as town houses for prosperous farmers who spent their working week in the backblocks and came to town at weekends.

The price asked by the vendors of the house we bought, on the less desirable east side, was so reasonable by Wellington standards that I felt guilty shaving a few thousand off – as bargaining convention demands – when I made our offer. The relatively low cost of housing reflected the fact that this once-wealthy town had fallen on hard times.

The records show our place was built in 1916. Architecture professor David Kernohan’s informative book Wairarapa Buildings describes it as a style known as the transitional villa, combining elements of the Victorian villa that preceded it and the Californian bungalow that followed.

It’s a wonderful house, full of the richness and warmth of native timber and incorporating a pressed-metal ceiling in the parlour (yes, the parlour), round leadlight windows and decorative woodwork in the arts-and-crafts style.

On the west side is a deck from which you can see the Tararuas over the trees. In the first summer we were here, we ate dinner on the deck night after night, in wonderment at the novelty – after years in Wellington – of being able to dine outdoors without having to nail everything down.

Before deciding to shift to Masterton, I had rung an old friend for advice. Publisher Ian Grant and his wife Diane had lived here for 30 years and one of things Ian said was that in Masterton, you get four distinct seasons in the year. In Wellington, of course, they all get thrown at you on the same day.

It turned out to be entirely true. In Masterton the summers are baking hot and dry. Winter can be bitterly cold, but the good days are clear, crisp and bright. In our first winter, our goldfish pond iced over several times.

I should also mention the Wairarapa sky. I know that technically, it’s the same sky you see over Wellington, or anywhere else for that matter, but it seems infinitely bigger. A New Zealand woman who married a Canadian from the vast prairie provinces told me they settled in Masterton because the sky reminded her husband of home.

We are more conscious than we ever were in Wellington of the rhythm of the seasons. In summer our rear verandah becomes an extra room. In autumn there are great mounds of dead leaves to be cleared from the deciduous trees that surround us – a price I’m happy to pay in return for the birdlife. And in winter there’s the ritual of keeping the fire burning virtually around the clock. As long as the big woodburner is going, the house stays snug.

Although we live only a few blocks from the centre of town, there’s a sense of being closer to nature than in Wellington. The abundant birdlife includes quarrelsome tuis, a resident morepork, the occasional kingfisher and an assortment of mallard ducks that come and go. Twice my wife has uncovered ducks’ nests in the garden.

There are eels in the stream over the back fence and a few months ago we observed a large shag hanging around. Some time later it occurred to us that the goldfish had disappeared from our pond, and that perhaps these two occurrences were related.

Less charmingly bucolic was the rats’ nest our builder uncovered one day while recladding our shed. A grisly carnage ensued as we hunted the fleeing rats down and exterminated them, he using his hammer and I a short axe.

So, after five and a half years, what conclusions have we formed about life in a country town?

Soon after arriving, I swapped observations with a friend who, like me, had moved to Masterton from Wellington, though several years earlier. He told me that within a few months I would find myself getting irritated if I couldn’t get a parking space right outside whatever place I was going to.

Well, he was wrong. It took only a few weeks.

Everything is ridiculously close. I can leave home for the movies five minutes before screening time and still have time to buy an ice cream and take my seat before the lights go down. If there’s not a vacant parking space within 50 metres of the Regent, I mutter grumpily about how busy the town is.

Oh, and there are no traffic lights. Instead we have roundabouts, which are clearly challenging enough for some local motorists.

Masterton is an unapologetically old-fashioned, unpretentious town whose primary  purpose is to service the rural economy of the surrounding district. It announces exactly what sort of place it is when you approach it past the Japanese-owned timber mill along a road lined on both sides by agricultural machinery suppliers.

The high-visibility vest is a staple garment in Masterton wardrobes, affirming that it’s a place where lots of people make their living from physical, outdoor occupations. I suspect there are not a lot of residents who list their occupation as “consultant”.It’s a roll-your-own town, a good-as-gold town. In Masterton everyone still says “good as gold”, an expression rarely heard these days in the cities.  It’s a place where men automatically take off their boots and leave them at the door, whether they’re muddy or not. Some businesses have signs requesting this but most blokes do it anyway, even at the pub.

It’s a town whose residents don’t seem to care too much about keeping up appearances. I’ve seen women at the ATM in their nighties and dressing gowns. You don’t see that in Khandallah.Sure, it’s a town whose reputation has been tarnished by some terrible crimes. No one’s quite sure why Masterton has endured more than its share of violence and abuse, though some suggest the town suffered more than most during the economic upheavals of the 1980s and 1990s.

There’s still too much petty crime and a lot of people on benefits, but you get the sense that Masterton has left the horror days behind.

There’s an air of confidence and prosperity that wasn’t apparent when we arrived in 2003. The town’s looking flasher. In fact you might say things are as “good as gold”.

Originally published in the Dominion Post.