The Wood That Built New Zealand — Now Lighting Your Home
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There's a moment, Mac says, that never gets old. You take a piece of timber — old, weathered, lifeless, pulled from a riverbed or reclaimed from a demolished villa — and when you cut it open, for the first time in perhaps a hundred years, the grain inside sees light.
That moment is the heartbeat of Lights by Mac.
Every pendant, wall light, and ceiling piece that leaves Mac's Tauranga workshop carries a story written long before he ever picked up a tool. It's a story about forests that once covered this country, about Māori ingenuity and European settlement, about trees that grew for centuries and timbers that have been waiting — sometimes underground, sometimes underwater, sometimes underfoot — for the right pair of hands to find them.
Rimu: The Workhorse of a Nation
If you grew up in an older New Zealand home, you've probably walked on rimu without knowing it. Rip up the carpet in any early 20th century villa and there it is — tongue and groove rimu, still warm and golden after a century underfoot.
Rimu was, for much of New Zealand's modern history, the timber that built the country. Framing, flooring, weatherboards, furniture, wagon interiors, railway carriages — rimu did it all. At its peak between the wars, it made up nearly two-thirds of New Zealand's total timber production. Māori had long prized it too, using it to build waka, craft tools and weapons, and even for medicine drawn from its bark and berries.
Today, new rimu can no longer be harvested from the wild. What exists is reclaimed, salvaged, finite. When Mac shapes a piece of rimu into a light, he's working with something genuinely irreplaceable — a material with a hundred-year memory baked into its grain.
Kauri: The Giant That Holds Time
If rimu built the country, kauri built its mythology.
These were the giants of the northern forests — trees growing to 60 metres, with massive trunks, living for two thousand years or more. Kauri timber was so prized that New Zealand's forests were dramatically reduced in the 19th and early 20th centuries to feed global demand. Today, standing kauri is strictly protected, and only reclaimed timber remains.
But then there's swamp kauri — and this, Mac says, gives him genuine goosebumps.
These are kauri trees that toppled thousands of years ago and sank into peat bogs across Northland. Preserved in anaerobic conditions, some of these logs are over 50,000 years old — the oldest workable timber on Earth. When milled and dried, swamp kauri reveals grain patterns that shimmer and shift like light through water, colours ranging from pale honey gold through to rich dark brown depending on how long the tree lay buried and what the earth did to it in that time.
To own a piece of swamp kauri is to own something that was ancient long before humans arrived in Aotearoa.
The Others: Kahikatea, Matai, Miro, Pukatea
The timber story doesn't end there. Mac also works with a small, carefully sourced collection of other native species — each with its own character, its own history, its own surprises.
Kahikatea, creamy and pale, was once milled almost to extinction in the early 1900s — not for houses or furniture, but for butter boxes exported to Australia. That a timber so beautiful was so nearly lost to something so humble makes working with it feel quietly significant. Occasionally, kahikatea pulled from rivers takes on extraordinary colour: greens and oranges in rare spalted patterns that can't be predicted or replicated.
Matai — dark, silky, and fine-grained — has a heartwood that Māori once tapped for its antiseptic properties. Miro, often mistaken for rimu, is harder than it looks and doesn't give up its beauty easily; Mac describes it as a timber that needs to be fought for. And pukatea, a hardwood that thrives in flood-prone lowlands and even grows a kind of snorkel root system to survive, is so rare and so striking that Mac considers any piece made from it a genuine prize of nature.
Light From the Forest
None of these timbers is interchangeable. Each has its own grain, its own colour, its own story. And none of it can be replicated — not by a factory, not by a machine, not by any process that didn't start with a tree growing in Aotearoa over decades and centuries.
When Mac hand-shapes a piece of native timber into a light for your home, he's doing something that sits at the intersection of craft and history. The light you hang above your kitchen table or beside your bed isn't just a fitting — it's a piece of this country's story, held in wood, shaped by hand, lit from within.
That's something worth knowing about.
Explore the collection at lightsbymac.co.nz — and if you have a space that calls for something truly special, Mac welcomes commissions.