Write for us

We commission and accept a small number of guest essays each year. The bar is the same as staff work: original reporting or criticism, Australian English, useful to a reader standing on a real site.

What we want

• Pieces that sit in one of the topic hubs: decorative work, polished floors, outdoor living, architectural concrete, or materials and method.
• Australian climate, soils, supply chains and standards. A generic Northern Hemisphere how-to will be declined.
• First-hand method, failure analysis, or a close reading of a finish. We are not looking for “ten driveway ideas”.
• Transparent conflicts. If you sell the product you are describing, say so in the first screen.

What we will not run

• Rewritten manufacturer copy or AI-spun listicles.
• Unlabelled paid posts. If a commercial relationship exists, it is disclosed and any paid URL uses rel="sponsored".
• Attacks on named trades without documented evidence.
• Image sets you do not have the right to publish. We prefer public domain or Creative Commons files, credited as on our credits page.

How to pitch

Use the contact form and choose “Write for us”. Include a working title, the hub, a 200–300 word argument, and three links to writing you are proud of. Do not attach a finished draft unless we ask. We reply when the idea is a fit; silence after three weeks is a pass.

Accepted essays are edited for house style (Australian spelling, metric units, named standards where they matter). We do not pay kill fees on unsolicited work. Staff and regular contributors are commissioned separately.

House rules in brief

Read the editorial standards before you pitch. If you need a model, start with the article archive. Guest authors keep copyright and grant us a perpetual licence to publish and update the essay on this site.