Welcome to Here. I really can’t thank you enough for buying this magazine – it’s the end of a long, emotional road for everyone from me to the photographers, the architects and magazine readers.  

I never thought I’d publish a magazine. Oh okay, I kind of thought I might but it was on the “things to try and do at 50” list, rather than the “things to do in a global crisis at 40 from your front room with one power point” list. I was really, really happy working for a big publisher, walking to work at a big converted bus shed, going to meetings and occasionally lunch and making a lovely magazine.

Then: boom. The country entered lockdown under Level 4 on the Covid-19 scale, we took our laptops home and a week later, the magazine industry as we knew it imploded. Many magazines, architecture ones in particular, closed overnight. I lost my job on the spot. The day the last issue of my previous magazine came out, I stood in the supermarket and cried. 

Time went by and eventually I turned 40, got fed up of doing nothing and started this magazine. One afternoon, my wife and I made a list of names and Here was at the top of both lists. Job done! 

It started with a few phone calls, then a few more, and then finally, hesitatingly – because it seems like something you need a small fortune to do, rather than a MacBook and a cracked iPhone – I commissioned some writers and photographers and sold some ads. 

And here we are! In print, in a supermarket or a bookshop, and you’ve picked it up and maybe you’ve just paid money for it. Or maybe you gave us a donation on Boosted – the response to which has been humbling, overwhelming: I felt a lot of responsibility, even guilt, that people trusted us enough to donate $22,940 and counting.

So, as I say: thank you.

Here is an architecture magazine about houses first and foremost, but it’s also about community, independent business, art, design and making. It’s about the incredible creativity in New Zealand and what it means to be here – this little country at the bottom of the world.

Here is committed to New Zealand houses and it is committed to the careful and considered, rather than the showy and excessive. We believe in the power of an excellent small thing rather than a big, flash dumb thing. We like things done well rather than the fleeting and unsustainable. We’re about colour, joy and fun. We celebrate the creative process: each issue, we have a guest art director who makes the home features and brings their own unique spin to it. 

There are a huge number of people to thank – and I’ve tried to do that on the opposite page, because you really should know how many people it takes to make a magazine – but in particular: Sarah Gladwell, our design director, for coming on board and pouring her heart and soul into this project. Emma Kaniuk and Tana Mitchell of Studio Akin, for being our first guest art directors. All the architects and their clients, for agreeing to publish their houses in a magazine they’d never heard of. And lastly, my long-suffering wife Hannah, who finally got sick of me talking about it and suggested I just get on and do the bloody thing. 

I look forward to seeing you online at thisishere.nz and again in print. Until then, enjoy our magazine.

Simon Farrell-Green

thisishere.nz

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