City Bach

More cleverness from our new issue: David Melling's City Bach, a tiny home in city-fringe Wellington with a big heart and, more importantly, a big barbecue area on the roof. Paul McCredie took the shots - you can check out plenty more of them when the mag hits newsstands on Monday June 1. And for those of you who are wondering, David Melling is the son of Gerald Melling of Wellington's Melling Morse Architects, who won our Home of the Year award last year. Architecture definitely runs in this family.

Our new cover

Our latest cover, some people have been saying with surprise, features people. And it's true! We did this partly because when we looked through the homes in the June/July issue, they were a very well-populated bunch, so we wanted the cover to reflect the presence of all that humanity. In the case of the house on the cover in particular, the people were the point of it - the home in the image by Mark Smith is one of two conjoined townhouses by Matt Brew of Cantilever Architects that were commissioned by two sisters who occupy a house each with their respective husbands and families. The sisters share a nanny and their kids hang out together all the time, but the homes are also designed so each family can have privacy when they feel like it. A clever architectural way to create small communities-within-communities...

Vulcano Redesign competition

Last night we had a function at Auckland's Studio Italia to celebrate the announcement of the winner of our Redesign competition, in which we invited nine architecture firms to redesign the 'Vulcano' table by Paola Navoni for Poliform. Here's the original table:

And here are the redesigns from the mag. The winning redesign, by Architectus, is on the opening page. They turned the table into a very elegant lamp:

The other eight redesigns are on the following pages in the magazine:

For those of you who live in Auckland or are planning a visit soon, the tables are on display at Studio Italia, 96 Carlton Gore Road, Newmarket, until June 30. There's a silent auction happening for each of them through that period, with all proceeds going to Habitat for Humanity.