Sweet As Tees › NZ Slang › Bach
Bach: A simple holiday home, usually by the beach or lake. Pronunciation: batch (nothing to do with the composer).
A bach (pronounced "batch") is a New Zealand holiday home — traditionally small, simple, slightly ramshackle, and close to a beach, lake or river. The classic bach has mismatched furniture, a deck full of drying togs, a drawer of jigsaw puzzles with pieces missing, and decades of family summers soaked into its walls.
The bach is one of the most loved institutions in Kiwi culture. It represents the great NZ summer: long days, barbecues, fishing off the rocks, kids running feral until dark. Asking "got plans for the holidays?" and hearing "heading up to the bach" is the most New Zealand exchange possible in late December.
Regional note: in much of the South Island, especially Otago and Southland, the same humble paradise is called a "crib". Same jandals by the door, same missing puzzle pieces, different word. Modern baches can be flash architectural numbers, but purists maintain a true bach should be at least slightly falling apart.
"Bach" is most widely explained as short for "bachelor pad" — the basic huts single men lived in near worksites in early 20th-century NZ — though Welsh settlers' word "bach" (small, dear) may have helped it along. It came to mean the modest family holiday hut, and in the South Island the same thing is often called a "crib".