Our story
Kia ora koutou! Nau mai, haere mai.
Welcome to HiTech Hippies,
A website run by Meg and Mark Smith. We are passionate about using the best technology to live sustainably. Our goal is to make it easy for busy people to start using technology to live a more sustainable life.
We had been apartment dwellers for years when we bought our dream property in Aotearoa, New Zealand. At the time, our friends thought we were a bit crazy swapping city life for a rural block.
To us, combining HiTech tools with a Hippie heart means using the latest tech innovations to make living sustainably more achievable for everyone. We want to show that you don’t have to choose between the convenience of modern technology and the rewards of a slower, more intentional lifestyle.
The pandemic accelerated our move from the city to the country. We hastily moved into our recently finished colour steel barn, and started the journey of transforming our paddock into a productive and beautiful place to live.
Over the last three years, we have transformed our barn into a home and our overgrown paddock into a park. Our whānau has grown to include a robot lawn mower, two bantam chickens, a rainwater harvesting system, a woodfired hot tub, solar powered everything, and a syntropic food forest.
We created HiTech Hippies to share what we are learning on our journey in the hope that we can make it easy for people to start taking small steps towards living more sustainably.
Mauriora!
Life on the block
A little of what we get up to
