Incoming: Brian MacKay-Lyons, Canadian architect extraordinaire

We're delighted to announce, along with our Home of the Year partners Altherm Window Systems, that the international member of our Home of the Year 2012 jury will be Canadian architect Brian MacKay-Lyons.

Born and raised in Arcadia, Nova Scotia, Brian studied in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He has worked and studied in China, Japan and Italy, returning to Nova Scotia in 1983 to challenge the region's 'brain drain' and make an architectural contribution to the area.

Since then, he's become a leading proponent of regionalist architecture, designing some fantastic houses and, increasingly, important public buildings in Canada and abroad. He has won five Canadian Governor-General's medals for architecture, as well as the American Institute of Architects' Honor Award.

Needless to say, we're really looking forward to his visit and are honoured that he's chosen to come here. He'll be visiting in February, and will give lectures in Auckland on Wednesday February 8 and Wellington on Thursday February 9. Stay tuned for ticket purchase details.

In the meantime, here's a short YouTube clip featuring Brian and his work. You can also see more of his work at his firm's website here.

Our upcoming redesign

Our December/January issue of the magazine will feature a redesign led by Arch MacDonnell and the team at Inhouse Design. We embarked on this process in October after our former art director, Miranda Dempster, was lured back to New York. During the design development, we made a short web film (heretofore known as the HOME movie) to show you some of the process behind the new design (thanks Dean!). We hope you like the film, and the magazine when it's published on December 5 - as always, we'd be delighted to get your feedback.

From our archives: A hint of summer

Summer's on the way. This cover from our June 1958 issue shows Tibor Donner's magnificent Parnell Baths in Auckland in all their splendour soon after they won the NZ Institute of Architects Gold Medal. The nice thing is they look just as good today.

Outtakes: Concrete house by Simon Twose

One of our favourite images from our current issue is this one by Paul McCredie of a house in Kelburn, Wellington, by Simon Twose (the house was originally commissioned when Simon was working at Warren & Mahoney's Wellington office). This view looks from the home's bedroom wing across its courtyard, through the living areas and out to Wellington Harbour.

The home's owner, Brett Mainey, is also a builder - and a man who likes a challenge. So he asked Simon to design a house "that would be difficult to build". What resulted was a long, involved and ultimately rewarding collaboration between architect and client. As you can see in Paul's shot below, the house really stands out in its street of villas, its concrete facade demanding a response.

The home's entrance is set a little below the street, a sheltered spot out of the wind that opens onto the navigational fulcrum of the house - left to the bedroom wing, right to the living area.

In the left of this photo (below) you can see the home's central courtyard. Rather than leaving a small amount of space around the perimeter of the property, Simon designed the house so it pushed to the edges of its boundaries and concentrated this space in its courtyard instead.

We like: Hometown Boomtown

Preservation arguments are raging in Christchurch right now, which makes this very interesting clip from the documentary Hometown Boomtown from NZ On Screen all the more pertinent. It examines the major changes to Wellington's cityscape (many of them made in the name of earthquake strengthening) in the 1970s and 1980s, includes interviews with many of the major players of the time (including Bob Jones and then-mayor Sir Michael Fowler), and has heaps of amazing demolition footage. Worth a look!

We like: Diana Vreeland, The Eye Has to Travel

Sometimes those late-night internet shopping binges don't carry any post-purchase regret: this morning our copy of Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel arrived in the post, and we've all been swooning ever since. Vreeland was fashion editor at Harper's Bazaar in its mid-century heyday (with editor Carmel Snow and art director Alexey Brodovitch, with an incredible roster of contributors including Richard Avedon and a host of other top-notch photographers) before moving to become editor in chief at Vogue. The layouts she worked on are still beautiful and inspirational. (The image on the cover was photographed at Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West). The book is a perfect Christmas gift.  

Outtakes: Melling Morse's Garden Shed

Wellington's Melling Morse Architects do an accomplished line in compact, relatively cheap, incredibly charming dwellings, and the Garden Shed, a finalist in our 2011 Home of the Year award, is no exception. It was given its name because its site is a garden sub-divided from a larger property, and because the home's owner wanted to feel as if she lived in the garden (rather than in a house that had monstered it).

This desire to keep as much of the property for gardening as possible partly explains the decision to position the house right up against the footpath of its street. (These photographs are by Paul McCredie).

While it presents a relatively closed face to the street, the 65-square-metre home's northerly elevation opens to the garden, with tall windows drawing sunlight into the double-height kitchen, dining and living space. The generous scale of the home's terrace adds an interesting note of grandeur to an otherwise highly efficient composition.

The home's main bedroom is downstairs and opens onto the terrace that overlooks the garden. Upstairs (shown in the image below) is a space containing a mezzanine study area and room for a spare bed if needed (the owner currently uses this area for doing yoga).