I’m writing this in late January: for various reasons, we are working well ahead of our deadline, which is unusual for this magazine. Small teams and tight budgets don’t usually add up to the luxury of time.

It’s warm and sunny today but it’s been quite the summer. Storms and rain and landslides – and tragedy, which came to the campground below Mauao, an event so unfathomable it seems seared into our collective consciousness and makes you go and hug your kids.

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We spent a few weeks in the tent in Northland with middle-aged neighbours who drank Midori and sang till midnight. The weather was often patchy: there was thunder and torrential rain and wind. Friends came to camp and brought their pizza oven, and on New Year’s Eve we made flat breads and chicken and hummus and toum, and ate around our camping trestle table. I declared it a Top 10 meal.

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It was squishy underfoot, and we wondered why things were quite as damp as they were – until the neighbours left, and we realised they’d punctured a water pipe with a tent peg and left us with a flood.

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We came back to Auckland and dried ourselves out. The city is quiet. Is anyone really back at work? It continued to rain and now, finally, it’s sunny again and we can sit outside in the long evening, with a profusion of mozzie coils to ward against biters, and I keep threatening to light the firebowl and forgetting. We are enjoying being home, in our house and catching up with friends.

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Between tent and house, I’ve been reminded that being together, usually around a table, is what makes a home. It’s about those spaces both inside and out where you gather together, rather than the private ones where you are apart.

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Similarly, for the houses in this issue, we’ve selected social places that prioritise living space rather than bedrooms – whether that’s extra space in the backyard of William Giesen’s home in Paekākāriki, a kitchen addition to a lovely old villa in Epsom, a welcoming retreat in Matakana – or the home on our cover, a 1980s pole house on Waiheke Island with a couple of bedrooms and generous, airy living spaces.

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I hope you enjoy them.

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