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Hello and welcome to Best Of Maclean’s.

Each Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday we deliver the top stories from Maclean’s directly to your inbox, showcasing the most interesting people, places and stories from across Canada.

This painter turned a shuttered schoolhouse into a dream studio

“There’s a freedom and lightness that comes with making work in the schoolhouse that I find refreshing,” says artist Kieren Brennan Hinton, who transformed a one-room schoolhouse in Elgin, Ontario, about an hour and a half's drive south of Ottawa.

Built in 1918 and then shuttered in 1967, it had the original wainscoting, a bell tower, and hardwood floors that were dotted with holes where the desks had been screwed in. “I had never been in a space that felt so handmade,” says Brennan Hinton. “There were no traditional partition walls. Almost everything was built with solid wood—nothing was veneered.”

Brennan Hinton knew the property would be perfect for plein air painting. Check out the stunning transformation:

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Moshe Safdie wants Canada to rebuild its sense of adventure

Before architectural giant Moshe Safdie donated over 100,000 archival items—and his Habitat 67 apartment—to McGill University, he sat down with Maclean’s to discuss his life, legacy & works—and his new memoir, which is an account of the complex politics involved in any major building project, and an expression of Safdie’s lifelong belief that architecture must be a force for social good. Read More

The Move: Why this veterinarian left P.E.I. for New Brunswick

Adele Doucet grew up in Memramcook, a small but scenic Acadian village southeast of Moncton. In 2015, she left the province to attend the Atlantic Veterinary College in Charlottetown. After graduation, Doucet was eager to return to New Brunswick. “There was a small Acadian community in P.E.I., but it wasn’t the same,” she says. Read More

The Trend: Miniaturists are making tiny design dreams come true

In a city where the average semi-detached costs over a million, buying property was out of the question. But artist Wei Xu realized she could still make her design dreams come true. She began constructing her own home—in miniature. She purchased a small wooden house-shaped cubby hole from the dollar store and spent hours hand-painting mat board so its back wall would resemble wallpaper. Then came the lighting. Read More

Inside UBC’s new Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre

In June, Formline became the first Indigenous-led firm to win the Governor General’s Medal in Architecture for its work. Go behind the blueprints with architect Alfred Waugh, who’s one of just 20 Indigenous architects currently registered in Canada and specializes in harmonizing seeming opposites. “I try to bring Indigenous ways of knowing together with Western knowledge,” he says. Read More

On newsstands now:

A complete guide to our roller-coaster economy

This is a uniquely confusing economic time. Ballooning inflation, mounting debt, a massive labour shortage, a distorted housing market—and have you seen gas prices? How did everything get to be so fiscally wacky, seemingly all at once? And how can we make it all better?

In the September 2022 issue, Maclean’s got 11 big thinkers to break down everything you need to know to understand Canada's economy right now:

Also in this issue:

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