AGE AND BEAUTY

were wrong. The 1950s Show caused a major revival in interest in modern period architecture, design and craft. To cater to this, the architect Bill McKay and I set up our own little magazine, Modern New Zealand, to publish modernist design and architectural history. Eventually Home & Building came around, asking me to write a column, ‘Legends’, about prominent design figures through the early 2000s. Later, I also contributed a bimonthly column on the restoration of the modernist house I’d purchased, believing it would make me get the job done faster. I then wrote a series of profiles on the Group Architects and a short-lived series on quirky interiors. After a gap or two, I’m back with a new regular column which dawdles around but which readers stop me on the street to talk about, which any writer loves. Writing for the magazine is only part of my connection to it. Those first Legends columns formed the basis of my first book, At Home (2004), and then appeared in their own right as 40 Legends of NZ Design (2006). New Dreamland: Writing New Zealand Architecture (2005) included reprints of a number of essays that first appeared in the magazine. Those books meant months spent with old copies of the magazine in libraries. I was back there last year as I researched Beach Life: A Celebration of Kiwi Beach Culture, which will appear later this year. I’ve been back with the magazines this winter for a book I’m researching on New Zealand architecture, design and craft in the 1970s. I’m always being surprised by what I find in the magazine, and I think that my connection to it is something that others share, not least because its pages record all the homes and buildings once considered the country’s most sensational. Very few escaped the magazine’s grasp. This is what I love most about my life with the fabulous 80-year-old HOME (nee Building Today, Home & Building Today, Home & Building, New Zealand Home & Building, NZ Home & Entertaining): whatever issue you open, it will reflect the style of New Zealand at the exact moment in which that issue appeared. That any 80-year-old can keep up that sort of pace and look as good as HOME makes me a lot less worried about accepting my lot as the magazine’s most ancient contributor.