Home New Zealand February 2018

I’ll start with an apology. You might have picked up that we went through a very large renovation on our little house in Beach Haven last year. It’s fair to say I went on about it a bit. Okay, I went on about it a lot. But there’s something about renovating that takes over your life. The trials, the tribulations, the joys and small victories. You talk to people at a party and quickly launch into a five-minute speech on the way your decking timber runs across the deck and then up the balustrade. Their eyes glaze over, they start to look around the room, and – just as you stand there showing grainy shots of the half-built roof on your phone – they back very slowly away. And you…

Sam Hartnett In this issue, our long-time contributor photographed an Auckland apartment (p.110), a house by Claude Megson (p.136), and one by Ken Crosson in Coromandel (p.98). How would you describe your approach? I prefer to work with hard directional light, so I start by feverishly checking the weather report. I usually end up circling the building multiple times, taking the same shots in variations of light – as the light changes, the forms change. Coming from an art photography background, I probably focus more on textures, light, form and materials. I think a lot about paintings when I’m shooting. The Megson house was constantly bringing Mrkusich to mind – his paintings would look great in that house. Tell us a bit about your own home. We live in someone else’s home,…

Design— Art and design throughout the country – plus plenty of new products to covet.…

“I always wanted to do a really long coffee bar,” says Al Borrie. He’s found just that with Cupple on Heretaunga Street, Hastings, where a six-metre service bench runs half of the building he shares with Ya Bon French Baker. At the long, skinny space where tastings and barista training takes place, customers can watch their brew being made. Separated by large glass sliding doors, they can also watch pastries being made at Ya Bon. “Both our businesses focus on the handmade, artisan quality of our products so it’s important for customers to see how things are made,” says Borrie, who also owns boutique coffee brand Firsthand. Cupple is the third coffee stop Borrie has opened in the area, including the original Box Espresso, housed in a container in Clive, and…

A new art installation at Brancott Estate rises elegantly from the Marlborough vineyard. “I don’t know why, but I insisted that it would go from flat to standing,” says New York-based designer Dror Benshetrit of his recently unveiled installation at Brancott Estate. “I actually wanted it to perform.” The result of a four-year collaboration with Brancott winemaker Patrick Materman, ‘Under/standing’ is a complex geometry of squares. The piece sits lightly on four points, its squares and angles self-supporting but interlocking. How did the place influence the project? DROR BENSHETRIT The two things about the place that were really fascinating for me is this alteration of nature, of raw nature into rows of nature – and the effect that you have when you drive by. You get this rhythm and movement…

The German artist and filmmaker Julian Rosefeldt and actress Cate Blanchett met in a chance encounter in Berlin in 2010: they agreed to collaborate on a work, despite not knowing what that would be. The result is Manifesto, an electrifying 13-screen installation that examines the grand ideas of art movements and time periods through history, drawing on the writings of Futurists through to the Dadaists via the musings of artists, dancers and architects. “Good evening ladies and gentlemen,” says Blanchett in one screen, dressed as a bland but authoritative newsreader. “All current art is fake.” The twist – and the fun – comes as Blanchett inhabits multiple personas, including a school teacher, factory worker, puppeteer, newsreader and a homeless man. These characters, many of them artless, voice complex, grand statements,…