HOME covers the best New Zealand architecture, design and interiors. It features inspirational, ingenious and just plain breathtaking homes from all over the country – as well as new restaurants, exciting art and the latest furniture releases.
HOME’s signature event returns for 2017: led by HOME editor Simon Farrell-Green, we’ll visit five of the most experienced heads in the design business to hear what’s exciting them most about the year ahead, and catch up on the latest from the Milan Furniture Fair. The day starts at 9am, finishes around 5pm and includes a restaurant lunch, and a well-deserved glass of wine at the end of the day. Tickets are limited to 50, so be sure to buy your tickets early to avoid missing out. (If you’re in Christchurch, keep an eye out for your event later in the year.) For tickets, please visit eventopia.co/stylesafari2017 . Tickets cost $90 and include transport for the day and lunch. For further information, please contact homenewzealand@bauermedia.co.nz…
I have a very clear memory of being given a bootleg tape of Nirvana’s 1991 album Nevermind at the back of English class by my friend Paul, who insisted that I copy it and give it back immediately. I never did: it’s still in a box under the house. I hadn’t listened to the album for years and when I did – this time on Spotify, not a scratchy cassette – I realised it wasn’t the hits that I remembered most fondly. Oh sure, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and ‘Come as You Are’ are modern masterpieces that changed music forever, but I also listened to the B sides – the tracks that didn’t make the singles charts – with intense affection. Around the same time, I was looking through old…
Greta van der Star A trip to the Arizona desert unearthed an alternative way of living for this photographer (p.46). What did you make of Arcosanti, the eco city by architect Paolo Soleri? He was practising some very important ideas that should be considered in all new city developments. It's a great legacy. I would like to go back, stay a while and check out more of the interiors. Could Soleri's principles be applied back here? Absolutely. His ideas about building up to avoid urban sprawl, and building smarter to have less environmental impact, are very relevant. It's as much about the human experience as it is about the environment. Urban sprawl means it's harder to get from one side of the city to the other, and time is wasted…
Brodie McDonald – along with brother Matthew Carroll and sister-in-law Christine Donnelly – opened Seabreeze in Westmere late last year. The son of award-winning furniture maker Bob McDonald, Brodie obsessed over the interior of the new cafe. “I guess growing up in a house full of beautifully designed and made furniture had a big part in forming my interest in design,” he says. How did Bob’s work influence the fitout of Seabreeze? All of the wooden joinery was done by Peter Young, who did a lot of the work for Dad’s furniture. We used hemlock, a wood Dad used for a beautiful couch that he never managed to release. I’ve also used trestle legs that Dad designed but didn’t get around to releasing. You worked on the fitout for 13…
Joe Backhouse started out in 1948 as a young cabinetmaker and died in 2015. Now Backhouse Interiors – owned by his son Gary and wife Michelle – has released the ‘JWB’ lounge chair to honour his legacy. “We wanted to reference the general aesthetic of the products he created,” says designer John Dinsdale, “without directly recreating the previous designs.” Joe’s designs have become highly collectible – were you tempted to just reproduce the most iconic? John Dinsdale: The design wasn’t based on any one product or range, but features signature details and forms from the early Backhouse range. Many of the previous products were very labour intensive and not economically viable in today’s competitive furniture market, but with advances in technology we were able to create a very complex form…
By the time you read this, HOME’s editor Simon Farrell-Green will be on the road – along with international guest judge Todd Saunders and celebrated architect Richard Naish – to judge the 2017 Home of the Year, brought to you by Altherm Window Systems. There was a bumper crop of entries this year and the panel will visit 15 houses in all – from Mangawhai to Queenstown via Cambridge and Lyttelton, Hahei and Island Bay – across seven days, multiple flights and rental cars. Then they’ll sit down and work out the final six, to be published in our April/May issue. There’s a building boom, sure, but there’s also a growing sophistication in New Zealand architecture. In the City Home category, there are houses on tiny urban sections where owners…
