The Architecture of Hospitality.

The Architecture of Hospitality.

Great beauty or purpose without design is a rare and miraculous thing. The more beauty, ease and purpose, the more likely you are to find great design. That is why architecture is such an important part of communities and hospitality.  It starts with our homes and ends in our town squares and public spaces – at it’s core, town planning is about creating functional and healthy communities that live well together,

Hospitality is my great art form. Welcoming people into my spaces and making them feel completely at home, as if they were their own. Part of that love includes a love of designing and making spaces that encourage conversation and comfort. For this reason, I love front porches. My love of the American South is birthed in my love of these homes with wide open entranceways, homes that greet the street with living spaces, spaces that are meant to be seen and enjoyed. I also love the hospitality that flows naturally through these spaces and into neighbourhoods and streets.

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The Wonder of Home.

The Wonder of Home.

“I want to see us become a family, the body of Christ become a home for the world.”

I’ve had a dream for my life as long as I can remember. Not a daydream or a wishful thinking kind of dream, but an actual dream that comes in the night, whether the darkness is quiet or full of storm.

It comes sometimes only once a year, sometimes every week. It is often inspired by absence as much as by presence.

In this dream, I live in a big house with wide windows that slide right open, just over from a large table and a big kitchen that opens to the whole living space. The table is surrounded by mismatched chairs and the light is warm, gentle. The room is full of life.

In that house, I am constantly talking, listening, laughing and cooking. I am endlessly wrestling with children’s happy embracing and high-pitched giggling. There is always someone just arriving to join the table. There is always someone being welcomed and I always wake, feeling that I have come home.

What can it mean, that after all these years, my dream is the same? (more…)

Christchurch: Media Scrum

The trouble with most first-time experiences, is the necessity of hindsight and reflection to see all the ways you could have done things differently, what you have learned and how you can be a better person as a result. Like I said in Christchurch: We Are Blessed; this is New Zealand’s first experience of dealing with, responding to and reporting a national disaster of this scale. So for media outlets, we are pushing into new territories and having to learn on the run. As such, the dynamics of our news screens have changed almost each day – as committed journos get tired and as hope fades.

But this is a critical opportunity to make vital learnings in our role as broadcasters and news agents, whether we work in corporate comms or behind newspaper desks, news cameras or on blogs and in social.

I’m anxious that we choose sensible, fact-driven journalism with appropriate spaces for commentary over the sensationalist, tabloid, bleed it leads style of disaster broadcasting that doesn’t fit within our culture and disregards the fact we are all so closely connected to one another.

Here are my few thoughts so far: (more…)

Christchurch: We Are Blessed.

Some will possibly find this thought offensive.. and that is not my intention. Instead, I want to dialogue the context of international aid and disaster response. I have sat quietly on some of these thoughts since the quake.. they have whispered in the back of my mind. And not because this is a subject for debate, in fact that couldn’t be further from the truth.. there is no wrong or right in this context. In the context of disaster, that is. (more…)

Christchurch, (Aroha mai, aroha atu).

At 12.51pm yesterday (Tuesday 22nd February) a magnitude 6.3 quake struck at a depth of 5km just outside of Christchurch in the South Island of New Zealand. Although of a lower magnitude than the September 4 quake, the shallow depth of yesterday’s tremor has left a much larger impact on the city and it’s surrounding townships.

New Zealand is a small place. We will all know someone directly involved with and affected by this earthquake. The dust and chaos of some of the first images of devastation and rescue remind me concurrently of 9/11 and Haiti. The care and concern of people overseas is immense, the anxious wait as numbers fluctuate, predictions are made and people registered as missing or found is being felt by just about everyone I’ve spoken too.

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