From the editor

When my mother died it took less than two hours to clean out her room at the rest home. Her La-Z-Boy and clothes went to Hospice, and her few pieces of antique furniture were divvied up among family members. That was it.

“We come with nothing, we leave with nothing,” muttered a workmate when I told them about it. Somebody else, who’s in the throes of helping their parents downsize from a jampacked home, added: “And in between we collect all sorts of stuff.” And that, in a nutshell, was the story of my mother’s home life.

Like many of the readers of this magazine, my mother was motivated to feather a nest for the people she loved. In her prime, her cupboards were equipped for every family occasion: there were cake decorating sets, gem irons, trays for serving invalid dinners. Her house had extra beds, a chest freezer full of food, stacks of clean towels. She was ready, just in case someone dropped by with their family and wanted to stay a month.

There was a lovable extravagance in the way she lived. But the past, as they say, is a different country. Mum created family homes from the 50s through to the turn of the century. Today, viewed through the prism of our current environmental anxieties, her generation’s “plenty for everyone” approach is starting to look wasteful and wrong.

There’s no doubt we need new ways of making our homes welcoming on a smaller footprint – and so, in this first-ever eco-themed issue of NZ House & Garden, we are picking the brains of Kiwi homemakers who are doing just that.

What we found was that in the same way that no one agrees about what makes a healthy diet – vegan, organic, low fat – there’s no concrete consensus about what makes a home truly eco. The homeowners we talked to all had different ways of doing their bit for the planet: for recycling whizz Annie Oxborough of Matakana (page 64) it’s about reuse and a big vege garden. For Peter and Debbie Fox in Canterbury (page 56) it’s about photovoltaic panels and hydronic heating. For the Reid family in Hanmer Springs (page 28), it’s about walking everywhere.

What wasn’t difficult to agree on was the home bit. Every homeowner we talked to understood that the end goal of their eco-efforts was not just a healthy planet – it was also a family space of warmth, wellbeing and welcome.

And in that way, at least, nothing has changed from my mother’s day.