Our new cover

Our new cover features a photo by Paul McCredie of a holiday home by Assembly Architects at Waipatiki Beach in Hawke's Bay. In the pic architect Louise Wright, who designed the home with her architect husband Justin Wright, relaxes on the window seat. The home is one of seven beautiful summer getaways in this issue, which is on newsstands now. 

You'll note on this cover that we've initiated a little design tweak, cropping the image in a way that we think makes the masthead really pop and adds a greater degree of clarity to the cover (as well as providing a contrast to the dominance of full-bleed images on the newsstand). We're also using a smart new headline font, Eames Century Modern, inspired by the stencils of Charles & Ray Eames and created by US type firm House Industries.

We're really pleased with how this issue has turned out. We hope it provides you with hours of happy summer reading. 

Outtakes: Gerald Parsonson in the Marlborough Sounds

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...

The new bach

Beach homes these days tend to present architects with a bit of a dilemma: clients want all the bells and whistles, but including them all leaves little chance of retaining any bach-like modesty of scale. Many a charming beach community in New Zealand has been monstered by the arrival of overly grand holiday homes. That's why we're so keen on the home on the Kapiti Coast on our April/May cover, designed by Max Herriot of Wellington's Herriot + Melhuish Architects.

The goal for owners and architect was to create a place that still felt like a bach, which meant the design process was all about identifying the essential qualities of the New Zealand holiday home, rather than transplanting a city home to the beach. The end result is a simple two-bedroom home with an open-plan living space under a monopitch roof. Here are a couple of Paul McCredie's shots of it:




Building this new holiday home involved knocking down an old one on the site, a difficult decision for the owners. The old bach was crumbling and was going to have to be relocated further back from the high tide line anyway; renovation options eventually became as expensive as building anew. The success of this project lies in the lessons that the owners absorbed from the old bach, which they had liked and stayed in for many years. The home shows that modest ambitions can create great results, for the owners of the home and the beach community as a whole.