HOME New Zealand

And the finalists are...

2012-02-13T15:59:00.000+13:00

Brian MacKay-Lyons and his wife Marilyn are on the plane back to Canada, and the Home of the Year judges have made their decisions. So, we're very pleased to annouce the finalists in our Home of the Year award 2012.

The winner will be announced at a cocktail function in Auckland on March 29, and the results published in our April/May issue, which is on sale from April 2.

In the meantime, we're busy getting our five very exciting finalists photographed to feature in our Home of the Year issue. (For those of you who can't wait, you can see amateur pics from our judging trip on our Facebook page or Twitter feed - just click on the Twitter box on the right-hand side of this page).

Anyway, the five finalists in the award (in no particular order) are:

A home near Wellington by Jasmax
A home at Pahoia, near Tauranga, by Warren & Mahoney
A holiday home at Piha by Herbst Architects
A bach at Onemana on the Coromandel Peninsula by Strachan Group Architects in conjunction with Unitec students
A bach at Whangapoua on the Coromandel Peninsula by Crosson Clarke Carnachan Architects.

We're really looking forward to publishing our Home of the Year issue and showing you how good these five homes are. Thanks to our Home of the Year partner Altherm Window Systems for making this all possible.

He's here! Still time for tickets...

2012-02-07T09:30:00.001+13:00

The international member of our Home of the Year jury, Canadian architect Brian MacKay-Lyons, has just arrived in the country to help choose the winner of the Home of the Year award (the award results will be published in our April/May 2012 issue).
Now this you'll have to see: Brian will be giving public talks at the University of Auckland on Wednesday evening this week and at Victoria University of Wellington on Thursday evening. Tickets are still available at the link here. (You can pick your tickets up at the venues).

Brian is a leading proponent of regionalist architecture - many of his projects line Nova Scotia's rocky shores. He's also a sheep farmer and sea kayaker. His talks promise to be fascinating (Architects get 10 CPD points for attending.) You can view more of his terrific work here. Thanks to our Home of the Year partner Altherm Window Systems for making Brian's visit possible. We hope to see you on Wednesday or Thursday.

Home of the Year Twitter updates

2012-02-04T15:19:00.000+13:00

We hit the road Tuesday with our Home of the Year judges - myself, Michael O'Sullivan (of Bull O'Sullivan Architects, the architect behind last year's winning home) and Canadian architect Brian MacKay-Lyons. I'll be posting Twitter updates from the road, which you'll be able to access by clicking on our live updates on the right-hand side of this blog page. If you're on Twitter, retweet our updates and spread the word! The winner of the Home of the Year will be announced in our April issue, which drops April 2.

Our new issue

2012-02-02T14:39:00.000+13:00

It's time for our new issue - this time, our annual issue dedicated to art, taking you inside the homes of New Zealand artists and collectors all over the world. This issue will reach subscribers tomorrow and be on newsstands from Monday. The cover is a photograph by Emily Andrews of former Auckland art dealer Anna Bibby's amazing house in Martel, France. The photograph on the sideboard is by Australian artist Anne Zahalka.

Other highlights (and there are plenty!):

We visit artist Martin Basher and TV producer Martha Jeffries in their apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn - as well as Martin's amazing studio in a nearby industrial building with views of Manhattan.
Auckland art writer and curator Kriselle Baker shows us around her Auckland apartment and her terrific collection of New Zealand photography, including works by Fiona Pardington, Michael Parekowhai, Roberta Thornley, Mark Adams and many more.
Shane Cotton and Luanne Bond's Manawatu family home, which Luanne designed.
A mid-century Auckland classic by architect Maurice Patience now houses Andrew and Kate Thomas and their fascinating art collection.
Artist James Kirkwood's daffy, adorable pagoda in his Titirangi back yard.
Patrick Reynolds takes fantastic photographs of Auckland's new Fort Lane development.
Katie Lockhart visits George Nakashima's beautiful studio in Pennsylvania.
Paul McCredie photographs David Trubridge's new workplace and shop in Hawke's Bay.
We've also got new architecture by Tennent + Brown Architects (in Northland) and McCoy & Wixon Architects (in Taieri Mouth).

And much more, of course...

Brian MacKay-Lyons - almost here

2012-01-31T17:21:00.001+13:00

It's just over a week until the international member of our Home of the Year jury, Canadian architect Brian MacKay-Lyons, arrives in New Zealand to give talks about his remarkable work in Auckland (on February 8) and Wellington (on February 9). Tickets are on sale at Ticketek at the link here.

Brian is a leading proponent of regionalist architecture (the project shown above is in Nova Scotia and was photographed by Greg Richardson), as well as being a sheep farmer and sea kayaker, so his talks promise to be fascinating. Architects get 10 CPD points for attending. Thanks to our Home of the Year partner Altherm Window Systems for making Brian's visit possible. We look forward to seeing you at these special events.

Travel: Ice Cube at The Eames house

2012-01-16T23:15:00.000+13:00

While we're on the subject of the Eames house (as in our previous post), the Eames Foundation has a short web clip of the house, with commentary from Ice Cube. It's worth a look:

Travel: The Eames House, Los Angeles

2012-01-13T23:11:00.002+13:00

One of LA's many modernist marvels, the Eames house is remarkable not only for its architectural pedigree (the original scheme for the house was designed by Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen, but significantly adapted before construction by Charles and Ray Eames), but because it is redolent of the rich, creative and generous lives of its occupants. The Eames's moved into the house in 1949; they lived there until their deaths (Charles in 1978, Ray exactly 10 years later). Their daughter, Lucia, set in motion the process of making the house a National Historic Landmark.

These days, reservations are required for a visit, but the process is relatively easy (you can opt for a self-guided exterior tour, or pay more for a guided tour of the interior).

We were staying in Santa Monica, which meant we could walk to the house in about half an hour - a rare luxury in LA, especially as the walk was mostly along Santa Monica beach. The house is set in a grove of eucalyptus trees in Pacific Palisades, although rather than being located in the centre of the property, the Eames pushed it to the edge of the grove to maximise their enjoyment of the open space. There are views of the ocean from the edge of the property. This image shows the entrance to the house, with its Mondrian-inspired colour panels.

Although we had opted for the exterior tour, the glassiness of the house means it is still easy to see inside. At the moment, the contents of the Eames's living room have been temporarily relocated to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as part of the LA-side Pacifc Standard Time exhibition. The living room of the house is now set up just as it was when the Eames moved in around Christmas 1949, with colourfully decorated tools suspended from the ceiling by string. An exhibition of photographs in the grove shows the development of the living room's eclectic decor. This photo shows a view back to the house from the lawn.

Outside the living room is a beautiful, Japanese-inspired courtyard.

Belowis another view of the entrance. These are my images, but you can find a greater variety of superior shots, as well as information on how to visit, at the Eames Foundation's site at the link here. It's well worth visiting if you're going to LA, and much easier to do so than you'd expect. While you're there, it's also worth checking out other parts of the Pacific Standard Time exhibition, which involves cultural institutions all over the city. We saw a terrific show downtown at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA which I'll write more about in a later post.

Travel: Chichu Art Museum, Naoshima, Japan

2012-01-13T11:08:00.000+13:00

Over the break we enjoyed a fleeting visit to the Benesse art site on Naoshima Island in Japan. Having stayed in Takamatsu, we caught a 50 minute ferry to Naoshima, and on arrival rented bikes for getting around the island. Naoshima is home to a number of museums, galleries and outdoor artworks, though the Chichu art museum designed by architect Tadao Ando was a personal highlight. Constructed in 2004, the reinforced concrete museum permanently houses works by Claude Monet, James Turrell and Walter de Maria. Submerged in the hillside, it does not compete with the natural landscape, lying flush with geometric sky-lights visible from an aerial view, as shown below.

Each gallery space is individually crafted around the experience of the art piece, and lit solely with natural light. Here is the gallery housing works by Claude Monet.

The image below shows a gallery featuring the work of Walter de Maria.

In Chichu, Ando has created a work of art in itself that honours the pieces within it. Accentuated by the absence of crowds and peaceful setting, our visit left us with a deep sense of calm.

Our new look

2011-12-08T09:55:00.001+13:00

Those of you who haven't picked up our latest issue yet may not know that we've undergone a bit of a redesign, courtesy of the lovely team at Inhouse Design. We've put some of the opening spreads from the features in this issue below as a tease. The first is a story about the artist Andrew Barber, with photography taken at his Auckland studio by Jeremy Toth.

On the western shores of Lake Taupo is this bach, a former dental clinic sensitively adapted by architects Rick Pearson and Briar Green, and photographed by Simon Wilson.

Some people have been asking, what's the difference? Good point, as we have opened stories with two full-page images many times in the past. The difference on these pages is our new fonts, but in the body of the magazine we also have a new five-column grid (the underlying organisational structure for the layout), as well as different treatments of small devices like bylines and picture captions. Not enormous changes, and the intention was for it to be evolutionary, rather than revolutionary - so if you haven't noticed, that's OK!

Brian MacKay-Lyons: Tickets on sale now!

2011-12-05T16:41:00.001+13:00

The international member of our Home of the Year jury, Canadian architect Brian MacKay-Lyons, will visit New Zealand in February to help choose the winner of the Home of the Year award (the award results will be published in our April/May 2012 issue).

He'll be giving talks in Auckland (on February 8) and Wellington (on February 9) when he's here, and tickets are now on sale at the link here. Brian is a leading proponent of regionalist architecture, as well as being a sheep farmer and sea kayaker, so his talks promise to be fascinating (Architects get 10 CPD points for attending.) Thanks to our Home of the Year partner Altherm Window Systems for making Brian's visit possible.

That's Brian below, and a shot of one of his buildings by Greg Richardson. For more information about Brian and his work, you can visit his website here.

Our new cover

2011-12-02T15:38:00.001+13:00

Our new cover features an outdoor room on Great Barrier Island, designed by Lance and Nicola Herbst of Herbst Architects and photographed by Jackie Meiring. We really like it and hope you do too - subscribers should receive their copies today, and the magazine will be on newsstands on Monday December 5.

Our new issue also features a slick black cottage by Fearon Hay Architects on Great Barrier Island, a colourful, 50s-inspired bach on the Kapiti Coast by Parsonson Architects, New Zealand-born architect David Howell's glamorous New York apartment, a former dental clinic reinvented as a bach at Lake Taupo by Rick Pearson and Briar Green, and lots more. The graphic design boffins among you will also be interested to know that this issue features a redesign led by Arch MacDonnell at Inhouse Design. Let us know your thoughts on it...

Incoming: Brian MacKay-Lyons, Canadian architect extraordinaire

2011-11-17T15:30:00.001+13:00

We're delighted to announce, along with our Home of the Year partners Altherm Window Systems, that the international member of our Home of the Year 2012 jury will be Canadian architect Brian MacKay-Lyons.

Born and raised in Arcadia, Nova Scotia, Brian studied in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He has worked and studied in China, Japan and Italy, returning to Nova Scotia in 1983 to challenge the region's 'brain drain' and make an architectural contribution to the area.

Since then, he's become a leading proponent of regionalist architecture, designing some fantastic houses and, increasingly, important public buildings in Canada and abroad. He has won five Canadian Governor-General's medals for architecture, as well as the American Institute of Architects' Honor Award.

Needless to say, we're really looking forward to his visit and are honoured that he's chosen to come here. He'll be visiting in February, and will give lectures in Auckland on Wednesday February 8 and Wellington on Thursday February 9. Stay tuned for ticket purchase details.

In the meantime, here's a short YouTube clip featuring Brian and his work. You can also see more of his work at his firm's website here.

Our upcoming redesign

2011-11-07T12:32:00.000+13:00

Our December/January issue of the magazine will feature a redesign led by Arch MacDonnell and the team at Inhouse Design. We embarked on this process in October after our former art director, Miranda Dempster, was lured back to New York. During the design development, we made a short web film (heretofore known as the HOME movie) to show you some of the process behind the new design (thanks Dean!). We hope you like the film, and the magazine when it's published on December 5 - as always, we'd be delighted to get your feedback.

From our archives: A hint of summer

2011-11-03T10:30:00.000+13:00

Summer's on the way. This cover from our June 1958 issue shows Tibor Donner's magnificent Parnell Baths in Auckland in all their splendour soon after they won the NZ Institute of Architects Gold Medal. The nice thing is they look just as good today.

Outtakes: Concrete house by Simon Twose

2011-11-02T18:22:00.000+13:00

One of our favourite images from our current issue is this one by Paul McCredie of a house in Kelburn, Wellington, by Simon Twose (the house was originally commissioned when Simon was working at Warren & Mahoney's Wellington office). This view looks from the home's bedroom wing across its courtyard, through the living areas and out to Wellington Harbour.

The home's owner, Brett Mainey, is also a builder - and a man who likes a challenge. So he asked Simon to design a house "that would be difficult to build". What resulted was a long, involved and ultimately rewarding collaboration between architect and client. As you can see in Paul's shot below, the house really stands out in its street of villas, its concrete facade demanding a response.

The home's entrance is set a little below the street, a sheltered spot out of the wind that opens onto the navigational fulcrum of the house - left to the bedroom wing, right to the living area.

In the left of this photo (below) you can see the home's central courtyard. Rather than leaving a small amount of space around the perimeter of the property, Simon designed the house so it pushed to the edges of its boundaries and concentrated this space in its courtyard instead.

We like: Hometown Boomtown

2011-10-26T16:26:00.001+13:00

Preservation arguments are raging in Christchurch right now, which makes this very interesting clip from the documentary Hometown Boomtown from NZ On Screen all the more pertinent. It examines the major changes to Wellington's cityscape (many of them made in the name of earthquake strengthening) in the 1970s and 1980s, includes interviews with many of the major players of the time (including Bob Jones and then-mayor Sir Michael Fowler), and has heaps of amazing demolition footage. Worth a look!

We like: Diana Vreeland, The Eye Has to Travel

2011-10-19T11:53:00.000+13:00

Sometimes those late-night internet shopping binges don't carry any post-purchase regret: this morning our copy of Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel arrived in the post, and we've all been swooning ever since. Vreeland was fashion editor at Harper's Bazaar in its mid-century heyday (with editor Carmel Snow and art director Alexey Brodovitch, with an incredible roster of contributors including Richard Avedon and a host of other top-notch photographers) before moving to become editor in chief at Vogue. The layouts she worked on are still beautiful and inspirational. (The image on the cover was photographed at Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West). The book is a perfect Christmas gift.

Outtakes: Melling Morse's Garden Shed

2011-10-19T11:38:00.002+13:00

Wellington's Melling Morse Architects do an accomplished line in compact, relatively cheap, incredibly charming dwellings, and the Garden Shed, a finalist in our 2011 Home of the Year award, is no exception. It was given its name because its site is a garden sub-divided from a larger property, and because the home's owner wanted to feel as if she lived in the garden (rather than in a house that had monstered it).

This desire to keep as much of the property for gardening as possible partly explains the decision to position the house right up against the footpath of its street. (These photographs are by Paul McCredie).

While it presents a relatively closed face to the street, the 65-square-metre home's northerly elevation opens to the garden, with tall windows drawing sunlight into the double-height kitchen, dining and living space. The generous scale of the home's terrace adds an interesting note of grandeur to an otherwise highly efficient composition.

The home's main bedroom is downstairs and opens onto the terrace that overlooks the garden. Upstairs (shown in the image below) is a space containing a mezzanine study area and room for a spare bed if needed (the owner currently uses this area for doing yoga).

We like: Patti Smith's photographs

2011-10-18T11:34:00.002+13:00

There probably isn't anything this woman can't do. In the New York Times' style magazine, T, A.O. Scott interviews Patti Smith, who has an exhibition opening of her photographs, all of them beautifully composed and acutely observed. The link to the article is here, and the photograph of Smith below is by Anton Corbijn from the New York Times.

From our archives: A royal visit, 1953

2011-10-07T07:00:00.000+13:00

In 1953, the visit of the Queen and Prince Philip was considered significant enough to make the cover of our predecessor, Home and Building.

Events: The Department Store

2011-10-06T18:40:00.000+13:00

Thanks to Altherm Window Systems, Waipara Hills wines and The Department Store for their support for a client function we held at The Department Store in Takapuna last night.

Our guests got to use their Department Store vouchers from their gift bags (which also contained The Department Store newspaper and a copy of the new issue of HOME) to shop a little before our conversation about design with architects Patrick Clifford of Architectus, Michael O'Sullivan of Bull O'Sullivan Architects and Richard Naish of RTA Studio.

We even had a celebrity guest (thanks for coming, Tim Finn!).

We like: Al Brown's Depot

2011-10-06T06:30:00.000+13:00

We would like to join the chorus of approval for Al Brown's Depot in Auckland's Federal Street. The pleasingly rustic interior, designed by Charlie Nott, feels as if it has always been there; the food is easy-going and excellent, and the service impeccable. These photographs are by Florence Noble, and are also featured (along with a terrific write-up by Simon Farrell-Green) in our latest issue. We wish the eatery was a bit closer to work, as we'd go there even more often.

Below, Al Brown at Depot before the lunchtime rush (the place is open from 7am but doesn't take bookings, so it's best to arrive earlyish to ensure you get a table in good time, although the staff are very good at managing waiting times).

A vintage aesthetic permeates the place, making it feel like a long-lasting and well-loved establishment, even though it's pretty new. Just out of shot in this pic is where they shuck the excellent oysters.

Diners down the back get a good view from their benches of the small kitchen.

Events: Kevin McCloud, a reminder

2011-10-05T16:54:00.002+13:00

A reminder, for those of you who don't have your tickets yet (and many of you do, we know), that HOME New Zealand is delighted to be part of the team bringing Grand Designs host Kevin McCloud to New Zealand to do a lecture at The Civic in Auckland on Wednesday October 26, 2011. Tickets are on sale via The Edge at the link here.

We like: David Hockney's iPad show

2011-10-04T22:42:00.000+13:00

One of the best things about our recent visit to Copenhagen was seeing David Hockney's show of his drawings on the iPad and iPhone at the Lousiana Museum of Modern Art (which is about 30 minutes by train north of the Danish capital). In a darkened room, a wall was lined with iPads showing slideshows of Hockney's sketches - all of them small observational moments with an incredibly charming naive quality to them.

Hockney began using the 'Brushes' application on his iPhone in 2008 and drawing by making strokes with his fingers. More recently, he has been using a stylus on his iPad. He says one of the things he likes about these drawings is the questions they raise about authenticity and reproduction: he emails drawings to his friends which are, as he says, not copies of the original works, but identical to them in every way.

His commentary accompanying the exhibition also makes the point that, in this context at least, the iPad is a magical medium, lending a luminous quality to these beautiful drawings that pen and ink could never emulate. There is also a pleasing showbizzy sort of touch to the exhibition, with the animated playbacks of some of the drawings being created projected onto one of the gallery walls.

You can read more about the exhibition at the Louisana Museum of Modern Art site here. The drawings below are on display on the site.

Outtakes: The Kare Kare house, our Home of the Year 2011 by Michael O'Sullivan

2011-10-04T11:33:00.000+13:00

From the black sand of Kare Kare beach, the HOME New Zealand magazine Home of the Year 2011 is almost invisible. The house was designed by Michael O'Sullivan of Bull O'Sullivan Architects for Bob and Barbara Harvey. It's a pleasure for us to be able to show you some outtakes from Patrick Reynolds' beautiful shoot of the house here. In the shot below, you can just see the house nestled among the trees in the lower right-hand corner of the frame.

Inside, the house faces south towards the beach, but draws light in from a sheltered north-facing courtyard and from glass panels on the roof. The weatherboard ceiling appears to fragment and fall away as it nears the home's southern wall, giving way to the glass panels overhead.

The ceiling tilts towards a band of windows that frame the view towards the beach into a horiztonal slot. Holes for lightbulb recesses are punched into the ceiling.

Outside in the courtyard, the ceiling plane appears to erode again to admit as much sunlight as possible into the space.

The main bedroom (the 129-square-metre house has two bedrooms in total) features orange carpet and windows wrapping the ceiling and wall at the northern end of the room. The door at left leads to the courtyard.

This view from outside the house is about all that can be seen of it from the road. It shows the main bedroom volume (clad in black bituminous roofing membrane) cantilevered over the carport.

We'll post more outtakes of the finalists in the 2011 Home of the Year here on the blog in the coming days. Thanks again to our Home of the Year partner Altherm Window Systems for their ongoing support of New Zealand's richest architectural prize.

Real Estate: A piece of New Zealand history, for sale

2011-10-03T10:45:00.000+13:00

It's not often you see a piece of New Zealand history in the real estate pages, but now potter Peter Stichbury and his wife Diane are moving out of their South Auckland house and studio and putting the property up for sale. (The auction's on Sunday October 30 - more info at the link here).

Peter stopped potting about five years ago, but you can read more about his works at Te Papa's website here.

Zaha Hadid's second Stirling Prize

2011-10-03T10:22:00.000+13:00

British architect Zaha Hadid has won the 2011 Stirling Prize for her design of a London school building, the Evelyn Grace Academy. She also won the award last year for the MAXXI Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome. The award, now in its 16th year, is intended to recognise the best European building designed or built in Britain.

You can read Vanessa Thorpe's story on the prize announcement in The Guardian at the link here. The newspaper also features a video presentation of the Stirling Prize finalists here.

Renzo Piano at Ronchamp

2011-10-03T10:01:00.000+13:00

There's an interesting piece by Jonathan Glancey in The Guardian about a new convent designed by Renzo Piano at Ronchamp, which of course is also the site of Le Corbusier's revered Notre Dame du Haut chapel.

Much consternation surrounded the announcement that Piano was to create a building here, but the purists need not be worried about architectural sacrilege, as Glancey praises Piano's "quietly masterful" work in producing a convent that "wraps itself around contours of the hill, burrowing into the landscape like the strands of a rosary pressed gently into the earth". You can read his story and see more images of the convent at the link here. We'd like to go and visit right away...

From our archives: Our worst cover ever?

2011-10-01T08:00:00.000+13:00

A gem from our archives that shows our predecessors didn't do everything right. This is from the unfortunate period in the 1960s and 1970s when the cover of the magazine was pretty much put up for sale. Here, a model in a field (in a fetching outfit, we must admit) holds an aluminium door frame leading to ... where exactly? We're baffled, but have to admit we kinda love it too.

Travel: Copenhagen's Kastrup Sea Baths

2011-09-30T09:00:00.000+13:00

Copenhagen's Kastrup Sea Baths, designed by White Arkitektur AB and built in 2004, are a delighful invitation to take a dip. And we needed enticement the day we visited in August, during a month in which the Danes had been complaining about their cooler-than-usual summer. There was one other couple at the baths, but they'd already been in the water. The lifeguard on duty was bundled up in a fleece jacket and scarf. It was only 16 degrees, but we had to go in, as we'd come all the way from New Zealand.

Besides, the baths themselves are fantastic - in reality they are not baths so much as a circular, sheltered platform at the end of a wharf that extends from the beach. (It's a short ride - about 15 minutes - on Copenhagen's new subway from the central city to a stop that's a few minutes' walk from the beach). The structure contains changing rooms and culminates in a diving platform.

The great advantage of the circular timber structure is that there is always somewhere to shelter from the breeze.

From the top of the diving platform, the view north towards central Copenhagen also takes in some of the offshore wind turbines. The images below show some of the other points from which swimmers can dive off the structure.

The clear panel you can see in the image below contains outdoor showers where swimmers can rinse off with a view of the Oresund Bridge leading from Denmark to Sweden as well as Santiago Calatrava's 'Turning Torso' residential tower in Malmo across the water.

In the photographs below you can see white doors which lead to the small changing rooms. That's the lifeguard reading in her chair - the cool temperatures meant it wasn't a busy day at the baths, but we were still pleased we took the plunge.

Our new cover

2011-09-29T12:30:00.000+13:00

Our new cover features a home by Matt Brew of Cantilever Architects on Waiheke Island, photographed by Patrick Reynolds. Subscriber copies should arrive on Friday September 30, with copies on newsstands on October 3.

From our archives: The gnomic celebration, 1945

2011-09-28T11:42:00.002+13:00

You can understand everyone was a little giddy, what with the war ending and all ... to celebrate peace, Home & Building published a tribute to garden gnomes and other enchanting outdoor creatures. "Maybe this is all just fantasy, but these ornaments do make any garden colourful, don't you think?"

My Favourite Building: Sir Eion Edgar and Dunedin's new stadium

2011-09-27T11:35:00.003+13:00

A sneak preview from our October/November: Sir Eion Edgar, chairman of Forsyth Barr, has chosen Dunedin's spectacular new stadium (by Jasmax and Brisbane-based Populous) as his favourite building. The photograph is by Graham Warman. You can read what Sir Eion has to say about the building in our new issue, on newsstands October 3.

Travel: London's Serpentine Pavilion

2011-09-26T16:35:00.001+13:00

If you're lucky enough to be travelling to London before October 16 (or if you're living there), we highly recommend you visit this year's Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, by the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor.

From the outside, as you can see in the image below, it's an inscrutable black timber box. We haven't been able to work out what the timber is coated in, but it had a thick, hand-applied quality that lent an artisanal feel to the structure's exterior.

There are three door-sized holes in the pavilion's exterior. Visitors can pass through any of them (entry is free). You then arrive in a dark, narrow corridor leading to other openings.

Once you've passed through these secondary doorways, you'll find the small miracle of a courtyard garden with planting designed by Piet Oudolf, the Dutchman who also had a hand in the planting on New York's High Line (along with a lifetime of fascinating projects (which you can read about here).

Zumthor's black walls throw Oudolf's pretty planting into sharp relief. It's a deeply contemplative space, surrounded by benches and tables and chairs with a view of the garden and the slice of sky above. On the way there, we'd wondered about the wisdom of Zumthor designing a garden space in the middle of Kensington Gardens, the enormous green space where the pavilion is located. But the courtyard garden works beautifully as a contrast to the open spaces outside, enhancing the appreciation of nature by confining it to this small space.

The modest but magnificent simplicity of Zumthor's pavilion is apparently typical of his work (we haven't had the good fortune yet of seeing any other structures by him, but many of you will know of the Thermal Baths at Vals, which you can see more of at the link here). His structures are rich in texture and materiality, but also inherently modest in their approach.

Each year the Serpentine Gallery commissions an architect who has not previously had a project built in the UK to design a summer pavilion in its grounds (the pavilions are auctioned off at the end of each season). Zumthor's pavilion is an interesting, self-assured contrast to the architectural fireworks of some of the projects of previous years. You can see a slideshow of previous Serpentine Gallery Pavilions on The Guardian's website at the link here.

From our archives: Favourite covers, winter 1939

2011-09-26T11:31:00.003+13:00

A favourite cover from 1939, where an elegant combination of images reflects the magazine's desire to cater to a broad audience including architects, homemakers, and gardeners (then as now, the magazine included regular features on landscape design).

From our archives: A new series

2011-09-23T11:31:00.000+12:00

Our next issue (published October 3) marks our 75th birthday: 75 years, that is, since Building Today magazine was first published (Building Today became Home and Building Today a few issues later, then Home & Building, Home & Entertaining in 1999, and HOME in 1997).

Despite all the name changes, our trawl through the archives reminded us that our mission today remains pretty much the same as it was then: to showcase New Zealand's best homes (and buildings in general, in the early days) and celebrate great New Zealand architecture.

The image above is of our first-ever cover (now stored in binders in the safe hands of the Architecture Archive at the University of Auckland). We'll be showing you a range of goodies from the archives on the blog over the next few weeks. And, of course, there's a special 75th anniversary feature in the October/November issue of the magazine, which has just gone to the printing press.

Events: Sean Godsell in Auckland

2011-09-23T11:15:00.000+12:00

Righto, we're back. Sorry about the silence, but we went on holiday and it seemed a good opportunity to allow you to watch our short web films of the homes shortlisted in our Home of the Year award. In any case, some news: Australian architect Sean Godsell is giving a talk in Auckland next Thursday September 29 at 6pm at the Dorothy Winstone Centre, Auckland Girls' Grammar School, 16 Howe Street, Auckland. Tickets are $25 from Ticketek (student tickets are $20) - you can purchase them at the link here. For information on other Architecture Week events, visit the site here.

On our cover: Home of the Year 2011

2011-08-03T22:28:00.000+12:00

We're delighted to announce that the winner of the HOME New Zealand Home of the Year 2011 is the Kare Kare House, designed by Michael O'Sullivan of Bull O'Sullivan Architects. You can read all about it in the new issue of HOME, on newsstands from tomorrow, August 4. Thanks again to our awards partner, Altherm Window Systems.

On film: SHORTLISTED Coatesville House by Ponting Fitzgerald

2011-08-03T22:21:00.001+12:00

This house by David Ponting and Matt Fitzgerald of Ponting Fitzgerald was shortlisted for the Home of the Year 2011.

On film: FINALIST Naish house by Richard Naish

2011-08-03T21:46:00.000+12:00

Architect Richard Naish of RTA Studio designed this Auckland house for himself, his wife and three children. It's a finalist in this year's Home of the Year award.

On film: WINNER Home of the Year 2011 by Michael O'Sullivan

2011-08-03T19:31:00.001+12:00

This year we worked with Wellington's Gibson Group to produce short films of each of the shortlisted homes in the Home of the Year award (thanks to our camera operators, Jon Bowden and Gary Hopper, and editor Colin Hodson). Here's a look inside the winning home by Michael O'Sullivan of Bull O'Sullivan Architects. As always, remember to pick up a copy of our August/September issue for full coverage of this home and the others in the award.

On film: FINALIST Remuera House by Daniel Marshall

2011-08-03T19:29:00.003+12:00

This home by Daniel Marshall of Daniel Marshall Architects was a finalist in our Home of the Year award 2011. Enjoy full coverage of all the homes in the Home of the Year award in the August/September issue of the magazine.

On film: FINALIST Garden Shed House by Melling Morse Architects

2011-08-03T19:29:00.002+12:00

Another of our Home of the Year 2011 finalists: The Garden Shed House by Melling Morse Architects. The August/September issue of HOME features full coverage, including plans, Peter Wood's great story, and Paul McCredie's beautiful photographs.

On film: FINALIST Vineyard house by Marshall Cook

2011-08-03T19:29:00.001+12:00

The vineyard house by Marshall Cook of Cook, Sargisson & Pirie is one of the four finalists in the Home of the Year 2011. This online short film was shot by Jon Bowden when we visited the home on our Home of the Year judging journey. Full details are in the current issue of HOME New Zealand.

On film: SHORTLISTED Concrete House by Simon Twose

2011-08-03T19:25:00.004+12:00

This Wellington house by Simon Twose was shortlisted in the Home of the Year award 2011. Look out for it in an upcoming issue of the magazine.

On film: SHORTLISTED Waiwhero Farm House by Tennent + Brown Architects

2011-08-03T19:25:00.002+12:00

The Waiwhero Farm House near Nelson was designed by Hugh Tennent of Tennent + Brown Architects, and was shortlisted for this year's Home of the Year award. Look out for it in an upcoming issue of the magazine.

On film: SHORTLISTED Park Point House by Vaughn McQuarrie

2011-08-03T19:25:00.001+12:00

The Park Point House by Vaughn McQuarrie was shortlisted for the Home of the Year award 2011. This short film was shot by Jon Bowden and edited by Colin Hodson.

On film: SHORTLISTED Little Oneroa House by Matt Brew, Cantilever Architects

2011-08-03T19:25:00.000+12:00

The Little Oneroa House by Matt Brew of Auckland's Cantilever Architects was shortlisted for the Home of the Year award 2011. Look out for it in an upcoming issue of the magazine.

Kevin McCloud comes to NZ

2011-07-28T11:45:00.000+12:00

HOME New Zealand is delighted to be part of the team bringing Grand Designs host Kevin McCloud to New Zealand to do a lecture at The Civic in Auckland on Wednesday October 2011. Pre-sale tickets have just gone on sale a couple of hours ago, and you can follow this link to access them. (Tickets are on sale via The Edge). We expect this to be a sellout talk, so book early. We look forward to meeting Kevin and seeing you there.

Home of the Year - our new promo reel

2011-07-26T15:20:00.000+12:00

We announce the winner of our Home of the Year award on August 3 (with the magazine on shelves the next morning), but in the meantime, here's a little tease featuring all 10 shortlisted homes.

This year we've collaborated with the Gibson Group to produce short films of each of the shortlisted homes. We'll be posting the films here on the blog from August 4 as well.

Outtakes: Gerald Parsonson in the Marlborough Sounds

2011-07-22T10:05:00.000+12:00

A little diversion for your Friday morning: these are outtakes from Paul McCredie's shoot of a bach in the Marlborough Sounds by Gerald Parsonson of Parsonson Architects that appears in our current (June/July) issue. As you can see, the home is made up of two pavilions, connected at ground level but elegantly offset from one another. Seeing them again here makes us wish we were on the way there now...

On an entirely unrelated note, we're just about to upload the trailer for our Home of the Year short film series. Stand by while we sort out the tech issues...

Fearon Hay to build new Auckland waterfront hotel

2011-07-17T19:57:00.002+12:00

Congratulations to Jeff Fearon and Tim Hay at the team at Fearon Hay Architects: the winners of our Home of the Year award in 2000 are now the winners of the competition to design a new hotel for Auckland's Wynyard Quarter, on the site of Team New Zealand's former base. The five-star, 300-room hotel (artist's impression below) is being design in collaboration with Peddle Thorp Architects and is expected to take five years to reach completion...

...but you don't have to wait that long to see the duo's work in the area, as they have also designed two buildings at North Wharf not far from the hotel site which will be ready for the opening of the first stage of the development on August 6 (you can see them in the image below). This is an exciting new precinct for Auckland, so we encourage you to head down and take a look when it opens.

OMA's CCTV building reviewed in the New York Times

2011-07-15T14:32:00.000+12:00

Apart from being transfixed by the UK phone hacking scandal this week, we were also interested to see Nicolai Ouroussoff's New York Times review of architect Rem Koolhaas' CCTV building in Beijing, now that the structure has finally opened. Ouroussoff is widely acknowledged as a fan of Koolhaas' work, and his provocative review and the ensuing discussion on the comments thread on the Times site is well worth a read. Here's an image by Philippe Ruault from the Times of the building, showing the garden beneath it:

You can read Ouroussoff's piece here. And you can see other photographs of the building from HOME's Beijing visit in an earlier post here.

Sorry about the relative quiet on the blog this week - we're hurtling towards next week's deadline of sending the Home of the Year issue to print.

The Home of the Year issue will be on sale August 4. An exciting extra this year is that we are creating online short films of each of the 10 homes shortlisted for the award, which you'll be able to view here on the site from August 4 onwards.

My Favourite Building - Vita Cochran

2011-07-05T14:20:00.000+12:00

We like Christchurch textile artist Vita Cochran (and her work) so we knew she was a good candidate to choose a building for our 'My Favourite Building' page. And she did - choosing not a wreckage, but a building that symbolises Christchurch's modern, progressive side and embodies the city's post-earthquake determination: The New Brighton Library, designed by Warren & Mahoney. The photograph is by Stephen Goodenough.

Here's what Vita wrote for us about the building:

"I love this building because of its inspired siting: a wonderful modern library, a building with personality, in the sandhills of New Brighton beach. It's elliptical and aerodynamic, nautical without being heavy-handed, with a roof like folded insect wings and sunshades on one face which suggest paper kites. In winter you can sit in a window seat with a pile of books and look out at the waves crashing just metres away, while being sheltered from the freezing easterly. In summer you can get your magazines out and read them on the beach.

"I love that the building is unashamedly modern yet it sits easily with the 1934 clock tower at its Western entrance. It embraces the wonderful windswept Monterey Cypress on its north side and it doesn't overpower the sand-blasted, salt-coated scruffy charm of the rest of New Brighton. It is welcoming, always busy. A small sign asks you remove sandy towels and beach gear before entering; otherwise it just lets you get on and enjoy it. Happily, though it is in the city's damaged eastern suburbs, the library came through the earthquakes with only minor cosmetic damage. It was soon open to the public again with its shelves full beyond capacity, carrying material from other quake-damaged Christchurch libraries which remain closed."

Len Lye, The Govett Brewster, New Plymouth, and Pattersons

2011-06-30T12:33:00.000+12:00

One of my first and most vivid art memories was at the Govett Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth. I was about nine years old and was on holiday with my parents and two younger brothers in Taranaki, and was trying to convince Mum and Dad that there was absolutely no need to spend a lovely summer's day inside a stupid art gallery. A few moments later, I was standing completely gobsmacked in front of the enormous whirling stainless-steel strips of Lye's 'Trilogy (A Flip and Two Twisters)' and thinking this art thing was actually pretty cool.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that it's exciting to see the Govett Brewster's proposed Len Lye Centre has taken another major step towards becoming a reality, with the government chipping in $4 million over the next two years to develop the project. We're also excited to see that it seems as if the Govett Brewster has chosen a design scheme for the building by Pattersons (headed by architect Andrew Patterson) that befits an artist of Lye's significance. Here's an artist's impression of the building, its silvery, jagged skin suggesting the movement and musicality of Lye's works:

You can read more about Len Lye and the Govett Brewster's planned Len Lye Centre at the link here.

More NZ architecture in Dwell

2011-06-27T10:09:00.000+12:00

More New Zealand architecture on the cover of US magazine Dwell: in their last issue it was Gerald and Kate Parsonson's bach on the Kapiti Coast (you can see the cover in an earlier post here), while the latest issue features Wellington's Amanda Yates and the house she designed for her parents on the Coromandel Peninsula, which you may remember featuring on the cover of our very own December/January 2010 issue. You can view outtakes from Paul McCredie's shoot for us at the link here, and you can read the Dwell story (with photographs by Matthew Williams) online here. Nice to see some international recognition for this very interesting house. As always, remember where you read about it first...

Travel: Fallingwater

2011-06-24T17:06:00.000+12:00

On my recent trip to the US I took the three-and-a-half hour drive from Washington, DC to rural Pennsylvania to visit Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. It's a wonderful house and a surprisingly moving work of architecture (actually, until a recent refurbishment, it was literally moving, as the cantilever was threatening to tip into the water ... our guide told us that Wright miscalculated the amount of steel required in the concrete, and even though the engineer added more during construction, it still wasn't enough to ensure its long-term stability). Anyway, here's the classic view of the house from a short way down the river.

We approached the house down a path from the visitor centre up the hill. The view below is one of the first we saw, as we crossed a bridge towards the home's entry. The stairs in the photo descend from the living room to the stream. The wall at lower right is the edge of a swimming pool positioned in the stream, requested by Mrs. Kaufman.

The photo below shows our group at the home's entrance. The tour I'd chosen took us to every room in the house, and we were also allowed to take photographs inside. You can see in this image how the home's structure reaches back into the rock face behind it for extra stability.

Here's the kitchen, used not by the Kaufmanns, but by their cook, who accompanied them on the family's visits to the house. It's a pretty simple affair, with great views towards the stream and also across the main terrace off the living area.

The living area had to be dismantled for the home's recent refurbishment, when extra reinforcement was added to the floor to stabilise the cantilever, but now it looks much as it did when the Kaufmanns occupied the house, with a stone floor, built-in furniture designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and a low ceiling that enhances the sense of drama and spaciousness when you walk out onto the terrace.

This view of the living area and the fireplace shows the way Frank Lloyd Wright accommodated natural rock formations in the design of the house. The red vessel is a large kettle that swings into position over the fireplace and was used to heat water or mulled wine.

The image below shows the dining area, still part of the large living space. The door at left leads to the kitchen.

This view is from the terrace off the living room, looking back at the dramatic interplay of the strong vertical chimney and the horizontal lines of the terraces. What you don't get in this image is the noise of the water rushing down the falls below, a constant reminder of the way the home hovers over the stream.

And this view is off the stairway leading up from the middle terrace to Edgar Kaufmann Jr's 'apartment' at the top of the house. Edgar Kaufmann Jr had studied under Wright at Taliesin and was instrumental in persuading his parents to hire Wright to design their weekend home. He also gifted the house to the Pennsylvania Conservancy, the reason Fallingwater is now open to the public today.

There's more to come next week - I'll post more images of the main house, and also the guest house further up the hill. But if you're heading to the East Coast of the US and are keen on seeing Fallingwater, you can book your tour at the link here.

Outtakes: Bergendy Cooke and Guy Fisher's Arrowtown house

2011-06-22T17:47:00.000+12:00

We've been receiving plenty of good feedback about our current issue, much of it fan mail for the house near Arrowtown designed by Bergendy Cooke (of BCA Studio) for her partner Guy Fisher and their daughters Anouk and Kiki. This was more than enough encouragement to feature some outtakes here from Paul McCredie's shoot at the house.

This image shows the house on its site, rising abruptly (and intriguingly) from the lawn. The doors downstairs lead to the living areas (set back to provide summer shade), while upper-floor windows are tinted and set flush with the exterior. The slats you can see on the upper floor are part of a deck containing a sauna and open-air bath.

The home's northerly elevation has a subtle kink in it that provides for a slightly different aspect from each of the rooms in the living area and upstairs.

Inside, the living areas are semi-open-plan, with walls of black cabinetry dividing the living and dining areas.

This view below looks back towards the kitchen through the dining room.

Let's go upstairs now - up the stairwell lined in beautiful boards of Southern Beech, to be exact (they're oiled with a product that has a whitening agent in it, so the boards now look as if they have soft pink tones).

Anouk and Kiki share a room. Bergendy and Guy designed some cool bunks for it.

The image below shows the steps (that double as shelving) from the guest room to the upper deck with the sauna.

And here's another view of the home's exterior, showing the entry at right (a door to the living room is at left).

Travel: The Glass House

2011-06-22T16:14:00.000+12:00

Last Sunday, I was in the US and went to visit Philip Johnson's Glass House near New Canaan, Connecticut. Many of you will already know about it: designed from 1945-48 and completed in 1949, it is credited with ushering the International Style into American domestic architecture.

Johnson's estate, which includes a number of fascinating ancillary structures (more of which below), was opened to the public a few years ago in accordance with Johnson's wishes after his death in 2005. It's easy to get there by train from New York's Grand Central Station (the journey takes about an hour and a half), but bookings are essential (you can make them by visiting http://www.philipjohnsonglasshouse.org/. All visitors are required to check in at the visitor centre in New Canaan before being escorted out to the estate in mini-vans. It isn't worth attempting a guerilla visit, as the gate to the estate is locked through the day, and you can't see the house from the road).

Anyway, it was a beautiful summer day and the house was at its ethereal best - larger than expected, amazingly tranquil, and incredibly well-sited on a promontory overlooking the fields beyond. Everyone on our tour wanted to move in right away.

I was part of a small group of about eight people guided around the house and its grounds. The arrival at the house is beautifully staged - it's invisible from the road, and comes into view as you reach the bottom of the driveway.

You can see in the image below that parts of the steel are in need of a coat of paint. Inside, the ceiling is showing evidence of dampness. The house is in the care of the National Trust for Historic Preservation which, given the current economic climate in the US, is looking more and more to private donations to maintain the property. This is not to say the house is falling into disrepair - far from it, it's just that the Trust is having to prioritise a schedule of works at the property. Proceeds from tours assist with these activities.

This view below is from the home's lawn on the promontory, looking back into the living area. Johnson had the trees regularly trimmed to enhance the view.

This view looks through the living area, featuring furniture by Mies van der Rohe, including a daybed specially designed for Johnson which subsequently went into production around the world. (Mies' glass house, known as the Farnsworth House, is located near Plano, Illinois, and was completed in 1951.)

The sleeping area is concealed behind a wall of cabinetry, although our guide told us that Johnson (who weekended at the house in all seasons from its completion to his death) often slept in the adjacent brick pavilion just across the lawn from the Glass House, a building that was conceived as part of the original composition.

Here's the brick house, which admits light through round windows on its other side. We didn't get to see inside it because it was recently flooded; the Trust is now working on a full refurbishment of its interior. The Glass House is reached via the path at left in this picture. The circular swimming pool is in the distance.

Elsewhere on the property, the subterranean painting gallery opens into an amazing space which, when I visited, was featuring works by Johnson's friend Frank Stella on its moveable panels.

Life on the estate sounded pretty fabulous. Johnson spent most of his time there with his partner, curator and editor David Whitney, who he met in 1960. The duo didn't throw huge parties, but regular visitors to the house were a who's who of New York society of the time. At the visitor centre in New Canaan, there's a great piece of film footage of Johnson's Rolodex, in which every name is famous, including many Rockefellers as well as luminaries such as IM Pei and Frank Gehry, Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg. (Our guide couldn't tell us if Johnson had a separate Rolodex for regular people, or if he just didn't know any).

Just down the path from the painting gallery is the Sculpture Gallery, a white brick building with a glass roof and amazing light. The sculpture at left in the bottom image is also by Frank Stella.

There are other buildings on the property, including Johnson's studio and a small building at the entrance to the estate which was the last structure he designed. You can see shots of all of them on the official website of the house. If you're in New York, do book ahead and go and see this (the visiting season runs from May through to November - on October 20 New York architect Charles Renfro, our international judge in our Home of the Year award 2010, is leading his own tour of the house - tickets for this are also on the Glass House website). It's a magical architectural experience, and an insight into what seemed to be a pretty magical and enthusiastically lived life.

Our new cover(s)

2011-06-03T09:00:00.000+12:00

A small innovation with this, our June/July issue: because we have three South Island houses in the issue (which is relatively rare, and very welcome), we decided to do a special South Island cover to highlight this fact for our mainland readers.

The house on the South Island cover is in the Marlborough Sounds, and was designed by Gerald Parsonson (whose work is also on the current cover of the US architecture magazine Dwell - read more about that in an earlier post here). The photograph is by Paul McCredie. (The other South Island houses in this issue include a Wanaka collaboration between California's Marmol Radziner and Wellington's Herriot + Melhuish Architects, and a house near Arrowtown by Bergendy Cooke).

Meanwhile, North Islanders get to feast their eyes on a photograph of the home of Davor and Abbe Popadich (and their son August), taken by Simon Devitt. The miracle of this house is that such a comfortable and interesting space was created for such a low cost - just $246,000 to build the whole house. You can read more about it in our new issue, on newsstands Monday June 6. Comments on which cover you prefer, and the split-cover approach in general, are very welcome - we'd love to hear your thoughts.

We have a winner

2011-06-02T19:00:00.017+12:00

We're delighted to announce that the winner of our furniture Design Awards 2011 is the 'A2' stool by Sam Haughton/IMO. Here are some of the stools in a shot by Toaki Okano.

And here's Sam Haughton from IMO, who designed the stools along with his colleagues Hannah Brodie, Craig McGinty, Jono Klein and Per Dahlgren.

The Design Awards were judged this year by Philip Clarke, the director of Auckland's Objectspace Gallery. Our thanks to him and to our Design Awards partner, Daniel Le Brun. And congratulations to Sam and his team on their win.

The stools were originally commissioned by Fisher & Paykel for their 'Social Kitchen' presentation, but are now available for a very reasonable $248 each from IMO. Their companion 'Fiord' table is a finalist in the Design Awards - you can see it and all the other finalists in our new issue, on shelves Monday June 6 (subscribers should receive their copies on Friday).

A little tease

2011-06-01T17:39:00.000+12:00

A little tease - we're announcing the winner of our furniture Design Awards at a function in Auckland on Thursday night (the full results will be published in our June/July issue, on shelves Monday June 6). The image below by Toaki Okano shows a few (but not all) of our finalists: the 'Odin' chair by Jamie McLellan (last year's Design Awards winner with his 'Flyover' table), the 'Fiord' table by Sam Haughton/IMO, a 'Weld' vase by Phil Cuttance (on the table), David Trubridge's 'Sola' light, and 'A2' stools by Sam Haughton/IMO.

Not pictured: the 'Isla' chair and ottoman by Alex Webster for Coast, the 'Adjutant' table by Nathan Goldsworthy, 'Band' shelves by David Moreland, and the 'Ruin' side table by Mark Seeney. You can check in here on our blog on Thursday night to see who the winner turns out to be.

Thanks again to our Design Awards partner, Daniel Le Brun, who made the awards possible and will be giving the finalists some of their fine product on Thursday night.

Chinese Art & Architecture

2011-05-31T16:24:00.000+12:00

Steven Holl's 'Linked Hybrid' building in Beijing (below) is just one of the many attractions on the China Contemporary Art & Architecture tour in September, which takes in architectural and cultural attractions in Beijing, Shanghai and Xizhou. The tour is guided by two New Zealanders (who are also Beijing residents), John O'Loghlen and Sophia McKinnon, who have run similar and very successful tours like it in the past.

China can be a tough place to tour if you don't speak Mandarin, so this is a great way to see the country through its architecture and contemporary art. You'll also get access to many locations you wouldn't otherwise get to see. The tour lasts a week and numbers are limited to a total of 16. If you're interested in taking part or getting more information, you can email John on john@gunghoventures.com or Sophia at sophia.mckinnon@googlemail.com.

Ceramics at Art + Object

2011-05-27T16:50:00.000+12:00

An interesting auction coming up at Auckland's Art + Object on June 8: The Martin Hill collection of International and New Zealand ceramics, billed as the most important collection of post-war studio ceramics ever assembled in New Zealand. The works in the image below are by (from left) Shoji Hamada, Hans Coper, Dame Lucie Rie, Tatsuzo Shimaoka and Michael Cardew. You can read more about the auction at the link here, and the works are all on display at the auction rooms now.

Michael Parekowhai in Venice

2011-05-27T16:25:00.000+12:00

Artist Michael Parekowhai is representing New Zealand at the Venice Art Biennale, which opens on June 4, and bloggers Jim and Mary Barr are there watching Michael's grand installation be unloaded, a process involving cranes and barges and lots of potential complication (but no actual major hiccups so far). You can follow the action on Jim and Mary's blog at the link here. The image below is from their blog, showing one of the crates containing Michael's work being unloaded.

Some of you might remember that we featured some photographs of Michael's installation, On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer, in our April May 2011 issue.

We were lucky enough to see the works - a heavily carved grand piano, and two bronze replica pianos with giant bulls atop them - at a warehouse in west Auckland before they were packed up to be shipped to Venice. It was an amazing event - the carved piano was being played while the bronze bulls stood guard nearby, and there was something in the air that caused quite a few people to weep. In a nice way.

The photographs of the works below are by Jennifer French, courtesy of Michael Lett. The Venice Biennale is on until October 25, a fantastic excuse to visit that spectacular city (as if an excuse was needed).

Parsonson Architects in Dwell

2011-05-25T22:03:00.002+12:00

Gerald and Kate Parsonson's holiday home on the Kapiti Coast, which Gerald designed and which won our Home of the Year award in 2001, is on the latest cover of Dwell, the US architecture magazine.

You can see a slideshow of Matthew Williams' photographs of the bach at the link here.

If Matthew's name seems familiar, that's because he used to shoot for us until he moved to New York a few years ago. It's great to see good New Zealand architecture represented abroad. Remember you saw it in our mag first!

Another of Gerald's designs features in our upcoming June/July issue (which also contains our annual furniture Design Awards). We send our last pages of that issue to the printers tomorrow (it'll be on sale on June 6), and after that we start tackling the Home of the Year 2011 issue.

The Auckland Art Gallery

2011-05-16T23:16:00.000+12:00

If you're in Auckland anytime soon, it's worth taking a walk up Kitchener Street to see the final touches being put on the refurbishment of the Auckland Art Gallery. There was some consternation when the refurbishment was first announced, mostly because the competition for the commission was won by Sydney architects FJMT, but our guess is that public opinion is now swinging in behind this alluring addition to the city's heart. The refurbished gallery is due to open in August. There's a webcam following the development on the gallery's website which you can access at the link here.

Did architecture kill the museum?

2011-05-16T23:07:00.000+12:00

There's an interesting debate going on at New York Magazine's website at the moment, where the closure of the American Folk Art Museum, housed in a much-admired building by Williams Tsien, has the magazine's art critic Jerry Saltz blaming the architecture for the museum's demise. Read Saltz's rationale and architecture critic Justin Davidson's rebuttal at the link here. There are many New Zealand admirers of Williams Tsien's work - the couple gave a talk here only a few years ago - and James Timberlake named them as some of his favourite architects, so you can understand some of the vehement disagreement with Saltz's finger-pointing.

James Timberlake in the Dominion Post

2011-05-09T11:49:00.000+12:00

Phew! We're back from our very busy week-long Home of the Year judging tour, with our visiting US architect James Timberlake (below) and New Zealand architect Patrick Clifford. We saw a great diversity of homes, and our thanks go out to the architects and owners of the homes on our shortlist for helping to arrange our visits. The finalists and winner of the Home of the Year award will be revealed in our August/September issue, out August 4.

While we were on the road, James gave talks in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch to a total of around 1,000 people, so thanks to all of you who came along. Highlights of his Auckland presentation will be posted online soon at eboss - we'll let you know when they go live.

In the meantime, James' interview with Hank Schouten of the Dominion Post is online now at the link here. Thanks again to Altherm Window Systems for making James' visit possible.

James Timberlake in Christchurch

2011-05-01T07:28:00.000+12:00

Good news - thanks to the support of Altherm Window Systems, the Canterbury branch of the New Zealand Institute of Architects and the Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology (CPIT) we've been able to organise a talk in Christchurch by James Timberlake.

James will talk about many of his projects and particularly about his experience in developing low-cost housing in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Our apologies for the relatively short notice, but I'm sure you'll understand that the situation in Christchurch means these events are not as straightforward to organise as in other centres.

This talk will be FREE as a gesture of support to Christchurch as the city enters its next phase of recovery. If you're interested in coming along, here are the details:

Thursday 5 May 2011, 6.30pm
DL Lecture Theatre, CPIT
Madras Street (entrance off the D Block Quad)

We look forward to seeing our Christchurch readers there.

James Timberlake in Viva

2011-04-28T17:05:00.000+12:00

HOME's former editor Claire McCall has a nice interview with James Timberlake in the New Zealand Herald's Viva supplement. You can read it here. Also! There are still some tickets available in Auckland and Wellington next Monday and Tuesday, which you can purchase at the link here. Thanks again to Altherm Window Systems for helping bring James here.

Our reader survey

2011-04-19T19:32:00.000+12:00

Plenty of you have already noticed the Reader Survey in our current issue - but if you haven't (and you want to be in the draw to win a fridge worth $3,300 from our friends at Fisher & Paykel) please fill it out and send it to us ASAP. We're getting plenty of interesting feedback about the magazine (much of it flattering - thanks! - and all of it constructive) and look forward to hearing from you, too.

On the wireless: James Timberlake

2011-04-19T18:56:00.000+12:00

James Timberlake was on Afternoons with Jim Mora on Radio New Zealand National this afternoon. You can find the interview online at the Afternoons homepage here.

For those of you who don't already know, Altherm Window Systems is helping us bring James here from Philadelphia in the first week of May to be the international member of our Home of the Year jury. You can read more about James and his firm KieranTimberlake's many achievements in the post just down the page from this one.

He's giving lectures in Auckland (on Monday May 2) and Wellington (on Tuesday May 3) when he's here. Tickets are selling fast on Ticketek at the link here.

Events: James Timberlake visits New Zealand

2011-04-06T15:06:00.002+12:00

We're delighted to announced that, thanks to the assistance of our Home of the Year partner Altherm Window Systems, James Timberlake of Philadelphia's KieranTimberlake Architects will be the international member of our Home of the Year jury. James (pictured below) will visit New Zealand in the first week of May.

As well as joining Patrick Clifford of Architectus and me (Jeremy) on the tour judging homes shortlisted for the Home of the Year award, James will give lectures in Auckland (on Monday May 2) and Wellington (on Tuesday May 3). You can purchase tickets to his lectures from Ticketek here.

KieranTimberlake Architects are at the top of their game right now: last year the firm won the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award, and in 2008 they were recognised with the Architecture Firm Award, the highest honour bestowed on a firm by the American Insitute of Architects.

In 2008, the firm developed a prefabricated dwelling (below) commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art for its exhibition Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling.

More recently, KieranTimberlake won the competition to design the new Embassy of the United States in London, shown in the rendering below.

The firm's best-known house is probably the Loblolly house (below) in Maryland, an elegant exercise in using prefabricated components to create a one-of-a-kind house. The image is by Peter Aaron/Esto.

James is the latest in series of esteemed international architects who have visited New Zealand to be on the Home of the Year juding panel, including Charles Renfro, Brendan Macfarlane, Glenn Murcutt, Kerstin Thompson, John Wardle and Ian Moore. We're very grateful all of them have taken the time to come here and share their knowledge and expertise with us. We hope you're able to attend James' lectures, which promise to be fascinating. Last year's events with Charles Renfro sold out quickly, so don't delay. Architects who attend are eligible for 10 CPD points.

Outtakes - Adam and Gaby Ellis' Wellington house

2011-04-04T16:05:00.000+12:00

Our new issue is only just out, yet a number of people have already nominated Adam and Gaby Ellis' Wellington house, designed by Amelia Minty, as their favourite. (Like exemplary parents, we don't pick favourites as we love all the houses we publish in our pages equally).

In any case, these early expressions of enthusiasm seemed like a good reason to publish some of Paul McCredie's lovely images that we couldn't squeeze into the magazine. Here are Gaby and Noa in the living area, with its great green views to the bush of the neighbouring hills in Houghton Bay:

Another view in the living area - this window offers a view south, with a peek at the sea. But mostly, the house is cleverly tucked onto its site with a hill to the south that shelters it from southerly winds.

You enter the home on the lower level, then climb the stairs in the photo below to reach the kitchen, dining and living space:

This shot looks back down the stairs (at left) towards the entrance.

Outside, the house is remarkable for the way it connects with its verdant surrounds, partly thanks to Adam's landscaping expertise (he runs the Wellington landscape design firm Pollen, which has just outfitted Nikau Gallery Cafe with some swish new courtyard furniture).

Another key contributor to the home's success is the way cars are parked outside, requiring a short walk up to the house. Not so handy on a rainy day, but we think the approach to the house (designed by Adam and shown in the three images below) is so appealing that facing a bit of bad weather is a small price to pay:

The image below shows the view looking down past the master bedroom and its deck to the deck outside the main living area, covered with a pergola.

This view of the house shows how Amelia designed it to step down the slope - a refreshing change to boring, bulldozed-flat sites, and one that makes the house much livelier as a result.

Beijing's 798 art district

2011-04-01T13:48:00.001+13:00

One of the best things to see in Beijing is the city's 798 art district, a fantastic area of old factories and warehouses now occupied by contemporary art galleries. I was there in February, marvelling at how contemporary art appears to be flourishing in what's supposed to be an authoritarian state. But first, a bit of an apology, as I was not as diligent as I should have been in writing down who the works you're about to see are by.

Someone at 798 told me a story about the sculpture in the image below that provided an amusing insight into the to-and-fro negotiation of what constitutes appropriate artistic expression in China. Apparently at one stage the state requested that artists stop using Mao's head in their works. The sculpture below was a response to that, which many critics took to be a suggestion that the state was headless. Then the goverment purchased one of the works in this series for the national collection, saying it believed the headless sculpture meant the government represented all the people equally. As far as I know, the artist didn't step in to say which interpretation was correct.

One of the best galleries at 798 is the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art (UCCA), established by European philanthropists. The exhibition below is named 'Moon in Glass' by artist Ling Jian and features portraits printed onto coloured mirrors. As you get closer, the images of the faces appear to recede, and you see your own reflection instead. What seemed like a glossy pop-art take on modern China was also working on other intriguing levels.

Also at UCCA, a fantastic show by painter Liu Xiaodong entitled 'Hometown Boy'. Liu went to stay in his old hometown for a period of a few months and painted beautiful, gentle scenes of his parents and childhood friends there. The show was accompanied by Liu's diary of his experience there, as well as an hour-long documentary by Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien that showed Liu working and interacting with his friends. The exhibition was, in part, a lament for the simpler style of life Liu believes China has lost - the state-run factory that used to employ most people in his hometown has laid off hundreds of workers, and many others have left to find work in the bigger cities. The exhibition raised questions about the price of China's recent economic progress.

The next few images show the amazing buildings at 798 (which I think date from the 1960s), and the juxtaposition of the contemporary sculptures outside them. As you can see in one of the shots, the area is also used as a backdrop for bridal shoots.

This fantastic building below contains Pace Beijing gallery, another of 798's main attractions - not just for the architecture, but the art inside.

This industrial structure loomed across the courtyard from Pace - I'm not sure who did the sculpture on the building behind it.

And I think that's all the holiday shots I have to show you - I hope I haven't bombarded the blog with too much Beijing. I've also written a travel story about the city for Kia Ora (the Air New Zealand inflight magazine) which comes out soon. And one of the hotels I stayed at, The Opposite House (designed by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma) is covered in the April/May issue of HOME.

Update: It seems the tone of optimism in this post about contemporary art flourishing in an authoritarian state might be slightly misplaced: the New York Times reports that contemporary artist (and critic of the Chinese government) Ai Wei Wei has been detained. You can read the story at the link here.

Our new cover

2011-03-31T16:33:00.002+13:00

Our new cover (our April/May issue is our annual renovations special) features a photograph by Paul McCredie of a renovation designed by Max Herriot of Wellington's Herriot + Melhuish. We hope you like it.

The issue features four renovations as well as four other houses, including shoe designer Kathryn Wilson's Spanish Mission-style Auckland apartment, Adam and Gaby Ellis' Wellington home by Amelia Minty, artist Max Gimblett's New York home and studio, and Simon Carnachan's Queenstown retreat. It's on newsstands on Monday - subscribers should get their copies this weekend.

Outtakes - Martin Poppelwell

2011-03-29T09:00:00.003+13:00

Artist Martin Poppelwell's Napier studio was designed by Wellington-based architect Ashley Cox, and features in our current issue. These are some outtakes from Paul McCredie's shoot there. It's a rare luxury for an artist to be able to have a purpose-built studio - and although Martin's studio is too economical to be anywhere near indulgent, the light, space and view to the garden feel luxurious indeed.

The studio is in the garden of the property Martin owns on Napier Hill, which is also occupied by his small cottage. You can see how the buildings relate to each other in the image below.

The studio steps down in three stages, which Martin divides into thinking, production and dispatch areas.

Here's the artist himself, taking in some of the late-afternoon sun.

This image shows the studio's skylights poking up above the corrugated iron boundary fence.

And here's the studio at twilight, with the cottage on the left of this image.

Behind the scenes - Art feature photo shoot

2011-03-28T09:00:00.001+13:00

Here's a behind-the-scenes view of our art photo shoot. You can see the final shoot in our new issue out on April 4. The idea of this shoot was to mix the 'old and new', pairing contemporary art and objects with older ones and vice versa.

Some of the artwork and furniture pieces waiting to be photographed...
Here's Toaki Okano shooting some of our favourite pieces - 'Ten Litre, Four Litre, Two Litre, One Litre' artworks by Elliot Collins, and side chairs designed by Garth Chester in orginal upholstery.
Our stylist Tanya taking a break in an old hairdresser's chair, auctioned at Art + Object. The artworks hanging on the wall are 'Poison' and 'Antidote' by Cornelia Parker.

Toaki and Jessica tweaking the shot to look just right. The large artwork is 'Nude Stack' by Fiona Banner, and the smaller two are from Art + Object. The Chair and Japanese pottery vase are from Bashford Antiques.

Beijing's Summer Palace

2011-03-25T14:22:00.001+13:00

Welcome to Beijing's Summer Palace, which I (it's Jeremy here) visited a few weeks ago. It was not at all summery, but it was very beautiful. This is the pleasure palace where the Qing dynasty frittered away all their money while the country descended into chaos. When you visit, you can kind of see why - it'd be hard to pay attention to matters of state when you're surrounded by sumptuous landscaping like this (below). The lake in this image, Kunming, is said to have taken 100,000 people eight years to dig. They knew how to think big, those Qing leaders...

The marble boat in the image below is the most notorious symbol of the excesses of the Empress Dowager, Cixi - partly because the navy was being starved of funds around the same time it was being constructed.

The formal rooms of the palace are all up the hill (created from the soil dug from the lake), but I'd seen them before so I stuck to the areas around the lake, which still include some impressive structures:

Here's the 17-arch bridge, leading to a small island in the middle of the lake from which a woman was singing Chinese opera across the ice:

The monochromatic tones of the frozen lake and accompanying hazy sky were lovely, once I became accustomed to the cold (the temperature was a little below zero).

The grounds of the palace are open to the public. These guys were giving their kites an early-morning flight on the 17-arch bridge. I was amazed they flew at all, given there seemed to be hardly a breath of wind.

The next Beijing area we'll visit is the city's exciting 798 contemporary art district. That'll probably be later in the week.

We like: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed

2011-03-25T11:49:00.000+13:00

Our copy of 'CCCP: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed' just arrived from Amazon, and we're agog. Photographer Frederic Chaubin spent seven years photographing extraordinary buildings that were designed and erected in the last 15 years of the existence of the USSR.

The old cliche is of Soviet architecture being a reflection of the state that created it: monolithic, overbearing and uniform. Chaubin's book shows the exceptions to this rule, an incredible flowering of creativity in the late-Soviet period that resulted in some of the most breathtaking and nutcase buildings you'll ever see.

Chaubin calls these buildings "aesthetic outsiders in an ocean of grey", and suggests they were able to be built because the "Soviet net grew slack... the intertia of the Soviet machine, too busy putting off its own demise, let the work it commissioned on its margins float free of its control". Most of these buildings are in the former Soviet Union's fringes: the Polish border, the Caucasus, or the Black Sea. But then he also wonders if the USSR under Andropov (who followed Kruschev's almost two decades in power) grew bolder.

Another good quote from Chaubin's very good opening essay: "The fact is that in Russia the most Neanderthal conformism always coexists with the boldest avant-gardes". (He's a pretty good writer as well as photographer).

There's always something enticing about faded utopian dreams, and this book is one of the best examples of that. So yes, it's highly recommended.

We like: Selby

2011-03-24T12:03:00.005+13:00

One of our favourite houses in our February/March issue is Selby, the 1973 gem just outside Havelock North designed by Miles Warren. It's pure class, from its park-like setting shown above right down to its signature foundation stone and exterior lights:

These are some more of the outtakes from Paul McCredie's excellent shoot, images that we couldn't fit into the magazine. Here's the entry court, which shows the drama of those sawn-off gabled forms.

This particular diagonal line (in the shot below) points to the main entrance.

Just inside the front door, a window reveals a smaller sitting room, set a few steps down from the home's main pavilion.

The main living room is a much more baronial affair, with lofty heart rimu ceilings supported by dramatic diagonal beams.

This shot (below) shows the swimming pool, as well as the pool house and garden tower. Both the latter structures were built some years after the home was completed - the tower, for example, was finished in 1993.

Selby's owners, John and Helen Foster, gave the house the garden is deserved, a beautiful, formal blend of manicured plants overlooking the tree-lined sheep paddock.

Here we are in the entry court again, with a shot that reveals how fully resolved every detail in the house is.

Incidentally, Selby is for sale (you can view the listing at the Bayleys website here). We normally avoid featuring properties for sale in our pages, for fear of becoming a real estate publication, but in Selby's case we made an exception because the house is so exceptional.

Christchurch damage

2011-03-17T11:13:00.002+13:00

Our friends at the blog Christchurch Modern are compiling a list of classic Warren & Mahoney buildings that have been damaged in the earthquake there. Sad reading. These houses are an important part of Christchurch's (and New Zealand's) architectural history, so we hope at least some of them can be added to the preservation list.

Obamao in Beijing

2011-03-17T11:09:00.003+13:00

Some tourist tat from Beijing: 'Obamao' T-shirts were doing a brisk trade, but our favourite item from this line was the mouse pad below. The bottom line on it reads 'You don't bird me, I don't bird you.' No, we don't know what that means either, but we kinda like it! We only hope the Republican Tea Party doesn't get hold of this memorabilia.

Beijing's Forbidden City

2011-03-14T12:34:00.004+13:00

Those of you who detest other people's holiday snaps, turn away! Because I'm about to inflict another Beijing experience on you. This time it's the Forbidden City. If you haven't already been there, you will almost certainly have seen images of it (hopefully in the Bertolucci film The Last Emperor, which is fantastic). The day I visited wasn't conventionally photogenic, as there was a pea-soup haze. But the monochromatic effect this produced made the frozen moat look even chillier:

The Forbidden City is literally the centre of Beijing - just across Chang'an Avenue from Tiananmen Square, and right on the city's great north-south axis (which culminates in the Olympic Village, 16km north). Inside, it's all fantastically rigid formality and symmetry, with a series of pavilions and grand, empty squares unfolding one after the other:

All this austerity makes the arrival at the residential part of the Forbidden City even more delightful because of its contrast to the civic areas of the complex. Here, the courtyards are smaller and more intimate, and filled with trees:

There are also smaller, whimsical structures in the residential area, such as this pavilion:

So that's your very brief Forbidden City tour. Later this week we'll visit a hutong district and the fabled Summer Palace (albeit in winter).

Home of the Year 2011 entries

2011-03-14T12:07:00.002+13:00

Entries to our annual Home of the Year award close at 5pm this Thursday March 17. As many of you already know, the Home of the Year award is New Zealand's richest architectural prize, with a first prize of $15,000. We welcome submissions from architects and homeowners.

This year we're also delighted to announce the support of our new awards partner, Altherm Windows. Altherm are also generously supporting the visit of the international member of our Home of the Year jury - whose name we will be revealing later this week.

In the meantime, you can download the Home of the Year entry form here.

We like: Beijing (part one)

2011-03-09T09:00:00.000+13:00

It's Jeremy here - I've just been on holiday to Beijing and thought I'd show you some of my (very amateur) photos. The Chinese capital, of course, is justifiably well-known for the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, the charming old hutong neighbourhoods, and many other older buildings. But China's incredible economic growth also means its capital serves up a feast of fantastic contemporary architecture. I won't show it all to you here (I'll save some other shots for subsequent posts) but here are some highlights. First, the airport, by Foster + Partners. Huge, elegant and swooping:

Almost everyone knows what Herzog and de Meuron's 'Bird's Nest' stadium looks like. Here's my favourite image that I took of it:

Still not quite occupied is OMA's CCTV Tower, partly because the fire at the TVCC Tower to the left (which you can see charred and scarred in the photo below) set back progress. I was fascinated by the almost organic patterns of the steel structure of the main building. It reminded me of an object that had been trussed with twine to hold it up.

The building didn't dominate the cityscape like the I thought it would - partly because the city is so big and because, at 54 storeys, it isn't unusually tall. But there's no getting away from it once you get into the general vicinity.

Tomorrow, I'll post images of some of the other contemporary highlights of the city - buildings by Steven Holl and Kengo Kuma in particular.

We like: Beijing (part two)

2011-03-08T09:00:00.000+13:00

A bit more Beijing contemporary razzle-dazzle, this time Steven Holl's 'Linked Hybrid' in the city's northeast. This ring of towers (with nifty coloured insets around their windows) is joined by a series of spectacular skybridges.

Travellers' tip: pretend to be a rich expat looking for Beijing accommodation like I did, and you can get a tour of the apartments. Or one of them, at least. The disappointing aspect of this was that the apartments were really poorly finished inside, with crap paintwork and cracked tiles in the bathrooms, as well as dust everywhere. Where's the glamour? My Beijing friends tell me this is typical of many new Beijing developments. Quality control is apparently difficult, and everything happens at breakneck speed.

Unfortunately our tour didn't include any of the bridges, because a security guard wouldn't let us in there. Strange. Also, the swimming pool, located in one of the skybridges, isn't functional yet. A woman I met who lives there said she doubts it will ever be. I don't think that's for design reasons - she thought it was probably just because the developer had moved onto other things.

Over in the centre of town - just west of Tiananmen Square, to be exact, is Paul Andreu's National Grand Theatre, otherwise known as 'The Egg'. You have to buy tickets to a show to get into the auditoriums, and unfortunately there weren't any on the few nights I was there:

Here's a shot inside the Water Cube in the Olympic park. The building was more impressive inside than I had expected, although it's already showing terrible signs of wear and tear, and it's less than three years old:

This is a building by Kengo Kuma in the area of Sanlitun, a cool restaurant and shopping area in the eastern embassy district. Kuma also helped out with the masterplanning of this 'village', which aims to replicate the feel of the alleyways of the city's old hutong districts. To me, it seemed like a really successful way to group retail and food outlets in a contemporary way without resorting to a mall-like structure. Here, you had to go outside to move between shops and eateries:

Also by Kengo Kuma is The Opposite House, one of the hotels I stayed in (which is just north of the village complex pictured above). The hotel's terrific (as is the Sanlitun area generally), and highly recommended.

Still to come - shots of the older parts of Beijing, as well as the 798 art district. I'll post them sometime soon.

We like: Take Ivy

2011-03-07T09:00:00.000+13:00

We're silly about Take Ivy, the recently republished 1965 book by Japanese photographer Teruyoshi Hayashida with text by Shosuke Ishizu, Toshiyuki Kurosu and Hajime Hasegawa.

The book is a series of photos of students at U.S. Ivy League campuses in the 1960s that seeks to explain the elements of preppy style. It's fantastic not only because of the way the captions refer to the students in the photographs as if they are some sort of exotic species (which, in many ways, Ivy League students still are), but because the clothes they wear are still so fashionable today.

The book's blurb says that when it was originally published, it set off an explosion of American-influenced "Ivy Style" among students in Tokyo. If you've been to Tokyo, it's easy to suggest that this so-called explosion is still reverberating today - although you could also argue that the way Japanese fashionistas have tweaked preppy style means they have turned it into a style all their own.

However, this is now, and that is then - and we recommend Take Ivy as a completely charming time capsule (and a very good gift for your favourite prep fans). It's published by Powerhouse Books. We got our copy at Auckland's Unity Books.

We like: Cafe Hanoi

2011-03-04T09:00:00.001+13:00

We're big fans of Auckland's Cafe Hanoi, not only for its fantastic Vietnamese street-style food, but for the beautiful interior of the building the restaurant occupies in Auckland's Britomart Quarter. When you consider the disrespect Auckland has generally had for its old buildings, it's a delight to see a 130-year-old warehouse as cleverly refurbished as this. The restaurant is featured in our current issue of the magazine. These images are from Jeremy Toth's shoot.

Nat Cheshire of Cheshire Architects wanted to preserve the integrity of the existing structure and the layers of history it contained. So paint was scraped back and left exposed, while the room was fitted out with paper lanterns and red-painted, reupholstered vintage chairs.

Cafe Hanoi is one of those rare restaurants where, if the need arises, you can feel very comfortable dining alone, especially if you sit at the bar with its view of the kitchen.

As the restaurant doesn't take reservations in the evening (apart from large groups - it does take lunch reservations), the bar is also the place to wait at for a table. You never have to wait for long, and the view of the bustling, beautifully decorated room makes the time seem to pass quickly anyway. We suggest you visit as soon as you can.

We like: Handcrafted Modern

2011-03-03T09:00:00.005+13:00

Our current favourite book is Handcrafted Modern, by American photographer and writer Leslie Williamson, who visited, photographed and wrote about some of the most memorable US homes owned by modernist architects and designers.

Williamson visited the homes of the late Charles and Ray Eames, George Nakashima, Harry Bertoia, Russel Wright (below and above), and Walter Gropius (bottom) among others.

As a whole, the book offers a counterpoint to anyone who suggests modernist design is minimal and cold-hearted, as all of the homes featured in it are warm, humane and utterly seductive.

Leslie Williams has posted outtakes from some of her shoots, as well as other work, on her blog, http://lesliewilliamsonphoto.blogspot.com/ But the beautifully produced book is the thing we like the best.

Design Awards 2011 with Daniel Le Brun

2011-03-01T16:48:00.003+13:00

We're now calling for entries for our Design Awards 2011, which close on Thursday March 24, 2011. The entry form is in our current issue of the magazine.

Christchurch

2011-03-01T16:20:00.004+13:00

It's hard to know what to say about the tragedy of the Christchurch earthquake. A website we like, Christchurch Modern (http://www.christchurchmodern.co.nz/) is saying everything a little more eloquently than we can endeavour to: "Earthquakes, we hate you". Our thoughts are with Christchurch residents, and we're giving to the Red Cross, too (http://www.redcross.org.nz).

My Favourite Building: Futuna's 50th anniversary

2011-03-01T15:31:00.010+13:00

Wellington art dealer Peter McLeavey's favourite building is featured in our current issue. Peter chose John Scott's masterpiece, Futuna Chapel, as his favourite - you can read why below. The photograph is by Paul McCredie.

"This enigmatic masterpiece has always held me," Peter writes. "For me it consists of two halves, the exterior and interior. The exterior evokes Maori civilisation and the cultures of the Pacific, while the interior reminds me of the beginnings of Christianity, the communities where the church began, the world of the desert fathers, the architecture of the Benedictine order and the Cistercians. The exterior is relatively unadorned where the form carries the aesthetic, while the beautifully orchestrated interior is embellished with the Stations of the Cross and glass designed by Jim Allen. Its reticence nourishes the spirit."

CELEBRATING 50 YEARS - THE PROGRAMME

Futuna Chapel, Friend Street, Karori, Wellington is the venue for all events. Seating capacity 100 persons. A marquee and extra chairs will be available for overfl ow. A small PA system will broadcast the Mass to the outside area. Public welcome to all events (preferential booking for architects at CPD events). Refreshments available for purchase. No parking on site please

FRIDAY 18TH MARCH

Powhiri and welcome (Th e powhiri will be outdoors weather permitting.)

Unveiling of restored plaques and gold medal

Music performance by Aroha Yates-Smith

Time: 5:00 to 7:30pm

SATURDAY 19TH MARCH

Mass celebrated by Archbishop John Dew

Time: 11:00am 12:30pm

ARCHITECTURE MODELLING SEMINAR / 15 CPD points

Cost: $15.00 NZIA members / $20.00 non NZIA members / Arch Students Free (limited spaces available)

Time: 2:00pm – 3:30pm

Participants: Plytech, Ponoko, Tony Richardson – Model Designer, architecture students

To Book: Th e Whiteboard Ltd / mail@thewhiteboard.co.nz / ph 04 4999550

FUTUNA: DESIGN RESEARCH SEMINAR / 20 CPD points

Cost: $20.00 NZIA members / $25.00 non NZIA members / Arch Students Free (limited spaces available)

Time: 4:00pm – 5:30pm

Participants: Amanda Yates Lecturer Massey University

Professor Dorita Hannah Massey University

Professor of Architecture Mike Austin UNITEC

Albert Refiti Senior Lecturer Spatial Design AUT

To Book: The Whiteboard Ltd / mail@thewhiteboard.co.nz / ph 04 4999550

The Dulux Futuna Lecture by Ric Leplastrier Architect (Australia) / 15 CPD points

Recipient of the Dreyer Foundation Prize 2009

http://www.ozetecture.org/oze_NEW_portfolio_richard.html

Cost: $25.00 NZIA members / $30.00 non NZIA members / $10.00 Arch Students (limited spaces available)

Time: 6:00pm to 7:30pm

To Book: The Whiteboard Ltd / mail@thewhiteboard.co.nz / ph 04 4999550

SUNDAY 20TH MARCH

Architects at Futuna / 25 CPD Points

Cost: $25.00 NZIA members / $30.00 non NZIA members / $10.00 Arch Students Free (limited spaces available)

Time: 9:30am registration and introductions, talks 10:00am to 1:00pm

Participants: Peter Beaven, Ian Athfield, Gerald Melling, David Mitchell, John Walsh (Communications Manager, NZIA)

To Book: The Whiteboard Ltd / mail@thewhiteboard.co.nz / ph 04 4999550

Public Open Day and Musical Performance

Cost: Koha

Time: 1:30pm to 4:30pm ( Music 2:00pm to 2:30pm)

Refreshments: Available for purchase Saturday and Sunday

Peter's selection of Futuna is timely, as the Futuna Trust is organising celebrations for the chapel's 50th anniversary in mid-March. Most importantly, the chapel will be open to the public on Sunday March 20, a terrific opportunity to see inside this fantastic structure. Here are the programme details (which are also available at http://www.futunatrust.org.nz/):

HOME in Kia Ora

2011-02-25T10:13:00.003+13:00

Many of you will already have noticed this, but Kia Ora magazine (Air New Zealand's inflight magazine, our ACP stablemate) is now featuring regular stories on great New Zealand homes, sourced from us. We like the partnership and how Kia Ora's wide readership gives extra exposure to great New Zealand design. Look out for a new house in each issue of Kia Ora, which is published monthly.

The great bach debate

2011-02-24T17:35:00.017+13:00

When is a bach not a bach, but a holiday home?

This is a question we've often pondered here at the magazine. Whenever we think we know the answer - that a genuine bach is indisputably modest - we run into the fact that the common usage of the term has expanded, and that it is now used to describe getaway homes that have all the bells and whistles we'd expect to find in a city pad. (A reader wrote in to complain that our use of the word 'bach' on our December cover was an abuse of the term, as the homes in the magazine were not truly baches. We reply that in some cases, this reader probably has a point - hence this post).

This territory - the boundary between bach and holiday home - is something architects Lance and Nicola Herbst have been exploring for many years now, most recently in the bach that features on the cover of our current issue (and in the images accompanying this post, shot by Jackie Meiring). The fact that the bach is on Great Barrier Island helps, as all houses there are off the grid and subject to strict site coverage limits.

Nevertheless, Lance and Nicky's design is determindely a bach in the modest sense of the word: two bedrooms, an outdoor room, and a simple combined kitchen and living space. No frills, but beautifully and thoughtfully detailed.

What follows is our short Q+A with Lance and Nicola from our current issue, along with some outtakes from Jackie's shoot to give you more of a look around the bach. Please write in with your comments about the difference between baches and holiday homes, and if you think someone should take a stand to defend the 'proper' use of the term.

HOME New Zealand: What makes a great bach, as opposed to a beach home?

Lance Herbst: It’s not about deprivation, but about consciousness, that business of being aware of how much water and electricity you’re using, and filling your day with rituals – you have to cut the firewood and go out and get the fish for dinner. This building has been designed to achieve rustic ideals, but there’s an enormous amount of detail in it to get to this level. That’s because we believe in style and elegance as well. You don’t have to compromise your sense of aesthetics.

The main living space of this bach is really a covered deck, yet you also have a much more snug sitting area, too.

Lance: In baches, we try and make one warm, well-edged space for when the weather gets lashy.

Nicola: We wanted this to have an intimacy, so we decided that we would have a fairly low ceiling with exposed beams – that’s given it a richess and makes this space operate in a calming and more inward-looking way.

Your bach designs are well-known. Do you like doing bigger houses too?

Lance: I have no problem designing slick houses. It would be a lot of fun doing something really slick and sexy. It’s about context. There’s nothing wrong with that from an architectural perspective.

Our new cover

2011-02-07T17:53:00.001+13:00

Our new cover is a photograph of a bach on Great Barrier Island by Herbst Architects, shot by Jackie Meiring. We like it a lot and hope you do too. The magazine is in stores from today.

Upcoming: Convergence/Divergence Object art & design

2011-02-03T10:18:00.007+13:00

If you're in Napier during February, check out Convergence/Divergence - an exhibition featuring current design works from several designers including David Trubridge and David Moreland. The show is on from Feb 4-28 at Statements Gallery, which is on the corner of Tennyson and Hastings Streets. Visit their website for more information. http://www.statementsgallery.co.nz/

Outtakes - Godward Guthrie in Omaha

2011-02-02T14:48:00.003+13:00

The home on the cover of our December/January issue by Julian Guthrie of Godward Guthrie Architects is an exercise in blurring boundaries between inside and out. While the whole idea of 'indoor outdoor' flow has become a titanic cliche, this is a house that makes it still seem like a noble aim. An array of screens, doors and glass panels can be configured to make the house feel connected to the beach no matter what the weather. Here's a view of the house from the beach, with the main living area on the upper floor. All the photographs are by Patrick Reynolds.

The home's living area opens onto terraces on its northern and western sides. An exterior staircase behind the screen in the picture above leads from the living area down to the lawn.

This view (below) from the street shows how the doors of the hallway can be opened onto the pool area (the hallway is also a very effective collector of solar heat in winter). At left on the upper floor is the terrace, which can be sheltered from the wind with moveable glass screens.

Below is a view from the sheltered pool area towards the beach. The rumpus room downstairs can be fully opened up to the weather, or closed down behind glass doors and cedar screens. In this photograph, it reads as a totally outdoor space.

We like: Mid Century Architecture

2011-01-12T11:10:00.008+13:00

Love these old grainy photographs from a Flickr photostream (featuring outtakes from old LIFE magazines) of mid-century homes in the US that we weren't fully aware of before. See more images here on flickr.

Rosen Residence. Architect: Craig Ellwood. Photographer: Michael Rougier. Comissioned: 1956.

White Ave, Roanoke Rapics, NC. Built 1959. Kirkwood F. Adams Residence. Photo: Joseph Molitor

Idea House II - McCall's Book of Modern Houses (1951). Designed by: William Friedman and Hilde Reiss with architect Malcolm Lien.