Our new cover

Our new cover is a photograph by Patrick Reynolds of architect Sir Miles Warren's amazing home and garden, Ohinetahi, on Banks Peninsula. The home was substantially damaged in the September 2010 Canterbury earthquake, but has now been rebuilt in a slightly different form. You can read Finlay Macdonald's in-depth interview with Sir Miles about his home and Christchurch's post-quake future in the magazine, on newsstands Monday June 4. 

Other exhilarating, beautiful, drool-worthy content in this issue includes:

• Our 2012 furniture and homeware Design Awards winner and finalists.
• Auckland architect Jack McKinney's remarkable villa transformation.
• A new Queenstown getaway by Pete Ritchie and Bronwen Kerr of Kerr Ritchie Architects.
• A major feature on architect Ian Athfield by Julia Gatley, coinciding with the upcoming launch of Julia's new book on Athfield Architects, as well as lavish coverage of Ath's remarkable, crumbling, inspiring Wellington home by Patrick Reynolds.
• New Zealand architect William Tozer's sleek, gritty design for a new apartment in an old London factory building. 
•  A fantastic encampment,style holiday home on Waiheke Island by Fearon Hay Architects.
• Much more, including interviews with Pete Bossley, Tanu Gago, Katie Lockhart, Martin Brown and others...

We like: Selby

One of our favourite houses in our February/March issue is Selby, the 1973 gem just outside Havelock North designed by Miles Warren. It's pure class, from its park-like setting shown above right down to its signature foundation stone and exterior lights:

These are some more of the outtakes from Paul McCredie's excellent shoot, images that we couldn't fit into the magazine. Here's the entry court, which shows the drama of those sawn-off gabled forms.

This particular diagonal line (in the shot below) points to the main entrance.

Just inside the front door, a window reveals a smaller sitting room, set a few steps down from the home's main pavilion.

The main living room is a much more baronial affair, with lofty heart rimu ceilings supported by dramatic diagonal beams.

This shot (below) shows the swimming pool, as well as the pool house and garden tower. Both the latter structures were built some years after the home was completed - the tower, for example, was finished in 1993.

Selby's owners, John and Helen Foster, gave the house the garden is deserved, a beautiful, formal blend of manicured plants overlooking the tree-lined sheep paddock.

Here we are in the entry court again, with a shot that reveals how fully resolved every detail in the house is.

Incidentally, Selby is for sale (you can view the listing at the Bayleys website here). We normally avoid featuring properties for sale in our pages, for fear of becoming a real estate publication, but in Selby's case we made an exception because the house is so exceptional.

Miles: A Life in Architecture

We know we're biased, because we're one of the sponsors of the exhibhtion, but we thoroughly recommend you visit the Christchurch Art Gallery to see the excellent show 'Miles: A Life in Architecture', featuring the work of Sir Miles Warren of the Christchurch (and now national) firm of Warren & Mahoney.

Art institutions are understandably skittish about architecture exhibitions. The best way to experience architecture, of course, is to be in a building. While we agree with this, we also believe that experiencing a building through photographs is a worthy stand-in for the real thing. At the exhibition, the excellent photographs of Warren & Mahoney buildings are combined with plans, helpful information panels and Sir Miles' beautiful watercolours of his buildings.

Sir Miles has also recently published an autobiography with the Canterbury University Press - we feature an excerpt in our current issue. It's a lively read, especially the part about how proud he was of the early notoriety of his Dorset Street flats, which were described soon after their completion as one of the ugliest buildings in Christchurch. Our article features some of Paul McCredie's photographs of the flats. The passing of time has shown them, in our opinon, to be anything but ugly:

One of the striking things about the exhibition is the awareness it promotes of the great architectural legacy of Warren & Mahoney, which has given New Zealand some of its most beautiful modernist buildings. Take the chance if you're in Christchurch to see the show and, if you have time, drop by the Christchurch Town Hall, one of the firm's masterworks. It is as elegant and seductive today as it was when it opened in the early 1970s.