From the editor - September 09 |
|
I have a friend who loves her bed so much it is a challenge to prise her out of it. She is NZ House & Garden style editor Tracey Strange, a creature of comfort indeed. She is a sometimes-reluctant member of our fitness group, which trains year-in year-out, wet or fine, at seven o’clock on a Saturday morning. It is my job to collect Tracey on my way to the Auckland Domain, so most Saturday mornings at 6.45 I wait outside her house, wondering if she is going to make it or if the lure of her deliciously comfortable bed will win. I can hardly blame her as her bedroom is just as you would imagine it from her work for NZ House & Garden.
The cover of this issue was shot in the kitchen of her house, with its feminine petticoat table and pretty shades of lilac. Our aim was to evoke a sense of simple but warm comforts. The pleasure of seeing the sun shining through a window, the colour of a bowl of flowers… they’re easy to enjoy and they’re not hard to create either.
I am pleased to read on page 124 that quilts are back. When the duvet revolution swept through the nation’s bedrooms, we busy bed-makers sighed with relief. No more hospital corners, no more weighty tonnage of blankets to be woman-handled into a tidy shape at the corner of the bed. All we had to do was tuck the sheets out of sight and fling a duvet over the lot. Voila!
However, it is my grandmother’s light-as-air quilts in all-over florals that live with me as a gold standard of comfort. Waking under those floating islands of warmth was one of my childhood’s great treats. Each morning my grandfather brought her a cup of tea with a non-salted, lightly buttered snack biscuit in bed. That courtesy was extended to grandchildren staying for the holidays. It seemed an amazing thing to us as, whenever we were woken by our parents, it was to be told to get out of bed and go to school.
It is interesting to see how much lilac has infused this issue – what a shame we can’t scent the pages as easily as we can colour them: our office would smell of lavender. Even my shirt is the right colour. Some of this we do deliberately (such as section headings) but in other places it just crops up all by itself. Sometimes it seems as though the universe helps us along with the creation of this magazine.
I knew there was more than the universe at work this week when I received an email from McDuff, my sister Rosemarie’s dog, about whom I wrote in last month’s editorial. I’d asked McDuff if he’d email me a digital photograph of himself and the letter, below, was a pleasant surprise.
Kate
PS - to sign up to our regular email newsletter, click here.  Dear Kate,
What a marvellous surprise when my doggy friends in the reserve told me that our relationship featured prominently in your editorial of the August edition of NZ House &Garden. I always knew you and I had a very special bond, so I was not surprised you felt the need to tell your readers about it. Being taken for a walk in the park with my human mates, despite the strange odours they exude after splashing themselves with funny liquids, is always a joy to me as there are never-ending things to explore and experience, but to finally have you express the special joy we feel in each other's company truly warms my doggy heart.
An unexpected outcome from your heart-warming editorial is that my doggy friends, knowing my special relationship with you, have made me editor of CALM (Cock A Leg Monthly), a specialist magazine produced locally and circulated amongst Eastern Suburbs dogs at the reserve swimming hole. Although I have never been the editor of a magazine before, I am very confident that on our future walks together you can mentor me in the ways of a successful editor and that we can develop a professional relationship in addition to enhancing our existing rapport and special friendship.
Your friend,
McDuff
Story: Kate Coughlan
Photographs: Mark Smith
| 
|
| 
