TO 50 YEARS OF WESTERN LIVING
It’s a mammoth task, distilling 50 years and thousands of stories into just one issue. As you’ll discover in the pages that follow, a large part of our process involved poring over our archives to discover where we’d come from as a magazine: the stories we told that are a time capsule of how we’ve lived in Western Canada for the past five decades—the homes, the dinner parties, the destinations we’ve explored and the many, many sexy ads for hot tubs ( you’ll see just a sample of those on page 30).
But a big part of what we wanted to do was to give space to others to share their own memories, too. We knew we’d want to highlight the great designers who’ve literally built and designed our cities for the better: the people whose work has been a big part of Western Living’s past, but who also created the building blocks for many more generations of designers’ works now and in the future.
And so when we started planning how we’d celebrate Western Living’s 50th, I sent a note out to dozens of designers and architects to ask what the magazine has meant to them, and who has been their inspiring light along the way. The memories were often very sweet (architect Allison Holden-Pope compares saving her first appearance in WL to saving your first dollar as a store owner) and sometimes laugh-out-loud (architect Jeremy Sturgess recalls how, when he and a WL editor arrived at a photo shoot, the house was in such disarray that they’d needed to roll up their sleeves and start cleaning). And all shed a little behind-the-scenes insight on the people you’ve seen in the magazine over the years. (Look for “My First Time” throughout this issue.)
And because so many of the inspiring stories they passed along to me were too good not to share, we called on today’s top architects and designers to talk about their heroes in this issue, too. There’s architect Michael Green on Arthur Erickson, landscape architect Amelia Sullivan on Cornelia Oberlander, interior designer Robert Bailey on Robert Ledingham and more. You’ll get an insider sense of why these acclaimed designers are so deservedly celebrated by their peers— and how they shaped the way we live today.
I hope you’ll enjoy this trip down memory lane as much as I have. Western Living is 50, and, lucky for us, she has so many more stories to tell. Thanks to all of you for being a part of that long life—and I look forward to seeing what’s next for her in the decades to come.