When we started this magazine, we didn’t know if it would sink or swim. And now we’ve made you issue three! And as we did, I started to reflect a little on the magazine, and the place it holds in New Zealand, and I realised something. We’re here to stay.

Over the past few months, we’ve been welcomed by New Zealand readers with alacrity, and we’ve enjoyed a level of commercial success I never would have thought possible for a startup magazine. For both of these things, we are incredibly grateful.

We’ve said it a few times, but Here is about this place, New Zealand, and what it means to live here. The magazine is progressive and inclusive; it’s an expression of the extraordinary creativity this country produces in so many ways, but most particularly in design and architecture. We celebrate good buildings and clever design, and we celebrate makers and artists. Our issues are organised around an idea, even an emotion – because architecture is human, not categorical, and we wanted you to respond to the magazine on an intuitive level. 

This year has been the most bewildering, anxious, and – occasionally – bemusing time I can remember. I lost my job and a pile of friends I very much enjoyed working with when Bauer Media closed its New Zealand operations. I moved house, started a magazine and cut off my hair. I started running every day at dawn and lost a few corporate-media kilos.  

Possibly the weirdest part was when we started working on this issue in earnest, just out of Lockdown II, and for the first time, it felt like normal life. There was a clear path forward, shorthand among the team – and yet the magazine still feels fresh and joyful and full of possibility and promise. The world has changed and hidebound legacies feel irrelevant. We love that. 

Somewhat coincidentally, Here 03 is dedicated to houses where their owners have made something deeply personal, and inhabited them with purpose and joy – whether that’s through art or furniture or collections or the memory of what came before. 

Somewhere along the line, thinking about those two concepts, This Must Be The Place by Talking Heads came on the stereo and I thought: that’s it. That’s about these houses, and it’s about this magazine.