Home New Zealand

HOME covers the best New Zealand architecture, design and interiors. It features inspirational, ingenious and just plain breathtaking homes from all over the country – as well as new restaurants, exciting art and the latest furniture releases.

Editor’s letter

Home New Zealand

Design, life, and culture • Art, books, events, people, and places of note.

Books • From chair design to poetry, from manuals on forest walks to novels about uneasy migrations, we select books that pair well with a bit of warmth.

Here & now • Queenstown-based artist, Elan, has spent the past 35 years travelling the world conducting philosophy programmes for global organisations. His life view, and the ethos of his teachings, is one that revolves around the gift of now; to embrace the present and exist wholly within it is, perhaps, the most rewarding and powerful reality we can experience as human beings.

A fragile legacy • Part of this year’s Resene Architecture & Design Film Festival, the feature-length documentary, Maurice & I, celebrates the surprising partnership of two of the most influential figures in New Zealand architecture.

Emotive subtlety • Polished plaster has a certain character that’s hard to look past, especially when it comes to feature applications. In this case, Ambitec’s Suave Polished Plaster introduces a minimal finish to a room of elegantly unfolding layers.

A beautiful collision • ABI Interiors began its journey in a humble garage set-up on the Gold Coast, with a simple yet powerful concept: to offer an affordable range of architectural fixtures that rivalled the quality of the highest in the market.

Quiet elegance • In the heart of this Westmere home is a collection of beautiful, sculptural materials that emanate from the ground up to create a space of embracing warmth with an openness that takes in an unusual yet captivating green view.

A meeting of materials • At the centre of the renovation of a 1920s home in the Christchurch suburb of Strowan is a kitchen of beautiful juxtaposition.

Reframed classics • Consisting of a series of interconnected rooms, the Knoll pavilion at the Milan Furniture Fair was designed by Belgian architecture practice OFFICE, and conceived as a space that envisioned life through a sequence of intimate spaces and elegant flower gardens.

Street smart: embracing urban density • Ken Crosson of Crosson Architects, who won Home of the Year 2024 for Boathouse Bay, considers a sustainable vision for our future cities — and offers his thoughts on why the imperative need for both environmental and social change is very much upon us.

North star • There are few places in the world where you get the sense of land emerging from the ocean — where you can trace the contours of the land down below the waterline — where land and ocean are not binary or separate, but continuous. New Zealand’s Paroa Bay is one of these places — a sheltered inlet enveloped by a perfectly irregular peninsula — with the larger subtropical and iconic Bay of Islands stretching out across the horizon.

Red glow • On the cusp of land and sea on the rugged coastline of Christchurch’s Te Rae Kura — the red, glowing headland — the folding form of this home echoes and reflects the transience of the coast: the dramatic light changes and the comings and goings of the tides that define this place.

On the edge • The location of this home, verging on land and sea in the Christchurch suburb of Redcliffs, meant material selection was focused on both durability and the creation of a subtle elegance suited to the remarkable landscape of natural beauty.

The choreography of home • There’s a finely crafted simplicity and considered calmness to the work being produced by young architecture studio Seear-Budd Ross. We had a chat with its...