This study examines successive New Zealand government's involvement in state housing between 1936 and 1973 and the impact and implications this had on tenants in a social context. The state house building programme was commenced as an attempt to resolve several concurrent economic and social problems. Contemporary ideas of organic planning, environmental determinism and the role of the nuclear family were incorporated into the houses' designs. As a component of a social welfare policy, state housing operated to reward the deserving respectable worker and his family, and after the war returned servicemen and other young respectable families. Apparently prescriptive post-war promotional literature has implied that the houses and their locations were designed to encourage and promote respectable young nuclear families. Since then, state housing policy has been subjected to changes. State housing tenants and former tenants were interviewed. The objective of the interviews was to gain an understanding of how their families interacted, through work and play, with their houses and environments, and to understand the extent to which their families' lives and practices were influenced by the housing, their suburban settings and the changes in governments' housing policies.