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.

Home of the Year judging

Entries have now closed to our Home of the Year awards, and we've been really pleased with the response: this year we had 34 entries, certainly the most in recent years and possibly the most ever. Of these, we've chosen 11 for the judges to visit in person. We'll then choose five homes (including the Home of the Year) to feature in the August/September issue of the magazine. The winning architects receive a $15,000 cash prize, presented in conjunction with BMW, our awards partner. We'll be on the road visiting the shortlisted homes in the first week of May, a journey that will take us from Rawene in the north to Queenstown in the south. We'll keep you posted about our trip and the houses we see on the way.

Venturi house

Architectural preservation can take many forms, but this is a particularly heartwarming story about the relocation of a New York home by the architect Robert Venturi. It ran a couple of weeks ago in the New York Times, but the story and slideshow with it are well worth revisiting:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/14/nyregion/14lieb.html?scp=1&sq=venturi&st=cse

Style Safari Wellington

A few times a year, HOME New Zealand takes groups of readers on tours of design stores in Auckland and Wellington. It's usually a fun day - each store provides a presentation of new items they have in stock, and we try and mix up the itinerary to visit an eclectic variety of shops. We also have a boozy lunch. Numbers are limited to 30, so it's also a good chance for us to get to know some of our readers. Our next Style Safari is being held in Wellington on May 8, and we still have a few tickets left. They include transport and lunch (and a goody bag) and cost $80 for the full day. They're for sale here: http://premier.ticketek.co.nz/shows/show.aspx?sh=HOMESTYL09&searchId=cf83c6d9-4e7e-4daa-a8c4-c0cffce84cf4

What to keep?

Renovations are always a question of what to throw out and what to keep. Some architects seem to advocate a sort of scorched-earth policy that negates almost all the aspects of the original building. But sometimes the most successful projects are the ones that incorporate aspects of the original structure, giving a home a rich combination of old and new aspects.

A good example of this is a renovation by Stephen McDougall and Lauren Wong of Wellington's Studio of Pacific Architecture in our latest issue. The home is located above Oriental Parade on Mount Victoria in what is designated a character area by the city council. The original 1950s concrete building was already very different from the timber villas that surround it, and it took the architects a long time to persuade the council that it was more appropriate to continue this modernist aesthetic than to make the building look like the villas around it.

Inside, though, much debate ensued over whether to keep the home's strong concrete columns and ceiling supports. The original idea was to create an uninterrupted open-plan space, but the structural solutions required to create this turned out to be highly complex. Retaining the columns and beams initially felt like a compromise, but now everyone involved with the renovation thinks it was a terrific outcome, as the columns and beams provide a helpful delineation of the different living zones.

Paul McCredie's photographs give a good idea of how the columns and beams work in the space:

Thanks to the retention of the columns and beams, what could have been a blank space belonging to any era now carries a strong sense of its 1950s origins, and the home is better for it.