Editor’s letter
There are many lovely things about what my son Ira calls “our NEW house”. Three bedrooms instead of one; two fabulous new decks with places to perch; a material palette that runs to weatherboards, fibre-cement and cedar. In short: it’s even better than we thought it would be. Now I just have to finish painting the bloody thing so we can move back in. One of the bigger changes, though, is something we never expected. Wall space. After years of juggling our (very modest) collection to fit a house that had few walls and lots of windows and slightly too much light, we suddenly have space to hang art, including a couple of lovely shadowy spots for works on paper. Meanwhile, the HOME team has been busy making our annual art issue. To start, there’s a new house at Muriwai by Lance and Nicola Herbst with a collection of New Zealand art that dates back to the 1970s and includes artists as diverse as Pat Hanly and Andrew Barber. At Point Wells, we feature a modern farmhouse designed around Alan Maddox paintings and fertility symbols. In Connecticut, contemporary New Zealand art sits beautifully in a 1970s lake house. In a delightful double feature, photographers and old friends Simon Devitt and Derek Henderson document each other’s homes, in Auckland and Sydney. Then, there’s our cover: gallerist Sarah Hopkinson’s loft in a commercial building in Grey Lynn, Auckland, which is home to an ever-changing show of challenging art. Standing in Hopkinson’s apartment while shooting our cover – she had recently changed out ‘Klaus Kinsky’ (2006) by Tahi Moore for ‘Bugging Out’ (2016) by Milli Jannides – I paused. There’s something incredibly appealing about changing the art up frequently, depending on the light or the season. We have the walls to do it: now we just need the art.