“Welcome to Here,” I wrote in my first editor’s letter five years ago, almost exactly to the day. “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 the magazine readers.”

And it had been. The country’s biggest magazine publisher closed overnight, I lost my job, we started a new magazine. People loved it, so we carried on – issue 02, issue 03. A year passed, then two. Now half a decade has passed, and we’ve made 31 issues, including this one. We’re proud of all of them.

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It’s getting to the point where it seems normal to make this magazine – business as usual! But it’s not normal, not really, to make a magazine with your friends and make a living out of it. I have to remind myself of that, and often.

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There are hard days, of course. We sometimes feel this magazine’s entire existence has been one big pivot, from lockdowns to supply-chain issues, and now what I’m told is the longest recession in 40 years. Advertising revenues are constrained both here and abroad, and we feel that too.*

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We often wonder what a “normal” year in business looks like, because we’ve never had one. (It begs the question whether this even exists, but anyway.)

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All that said, over the past five years we’ve noticed two things, and they’re the reason we keep getting up in the morning. One is the enormous support we receive from readers, the way you’ve adopted this magazine, made it part of your life, lined them up in numerical order on your bookshelf, and sent us a photo to prove it. We love that: keep them coming.

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The second is that architecture in Aotearoa keeps getting better. When we started, we said often – and we still say it – that we wanted to explore a different kind of architecture, one that explored colour, joy and fun. It felt like architecture in Aotearoa had got a bit stagnant, a bit polite: we wanted to shake that up, see some bravery, whether that was in a luxury house or a humble one.

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Despite all the challenges of the past five years – or maybe because of them – homes in Aotearoa are more expressive, more personal than they were five years ago. There is colour and joy and fun. We still get excited when photos of an incredible house drop on our desks, or an unknown architect gets in touch with a fresh new project.

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So keep doing it, all of you – because we will.

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*You can email partnership@thisishere.nz to help with that – just saying.

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