Inspired by a very internationalist, robust coastal home for an award-winning film, this beach house by Sumich Chaplin Architects offers ambience and plenty of drama.

Inspired by a very internationalist, robust
coastal home for an award-winning film, this
beach house by Sumich Chaplin Architects
offers ambience and plenty of drama.

 
Home of the Year

Home of the Year 2026: Eastbourne House

Wedged into a cliffside beside the wild harbour of Wellington’s Eastern Bays, this year’s Home of the Year winner by Stevens Lawson Architects is a masterly object full of sculpture and craftsmanship, grandeur and human scale.

Home of the Year

Readers’ Choice Home of the Year 2026

Home of the Decade (2015—2025) winning firm RTA Studio has refined a Southern language of gables and barn-like forms into a coveted residential style that is equally at home in the Alps as it is in the inner city.

Home of the Year

Rural Home of the Year 2026

Tucked into the expansive alpine landscape outside Arrowtown, this home takes its cues from the rugged vernacular of Central Otago, sharpened with a distinctly contemporary edge.

Home of the Year

City Home of the Year 2026

An urban treehouse in the heart of Auckland, this project reimagines how architecture can engage with nature in a dense urban setting.

Home of the Year

Green Home of the Year 2026

This home on Kāpiti Coast knows its place, not just as a shelter for its people but as a small part of a much wider whole.

Home of the Year

Small Home of the Year 2026

Perched high on a Titirangi hillside with sweeping views from the Waitākere Ranges to the Auckland City skyline, this modest home carries a larger architectural intent.

Home of the Year

Multi-Unit Home of the Year 2026

There is a certain composure to the work of Stevens Lawson Architects — an ongoing dialogue of ideas that seems to flow between projects. Here, on a ridgeline at the meeting point of Auckland suburbs Glen Innes and Glendowie, that conversation finds expression in an unexpected setting.

Home of the Year

Ti Point House

Occupying a remarkable site above Leigh, this house by Crosson Architects approaches the landscape with admirable restraint.

Home of the Year

M House

In an otherwise flat paddock, this industrial-seeming house by Ponting Fitzgerald Architects presents a wonderfully simple and sculptural response to both site and client.

Homes

Onetangi Cliff House

Seemingly unmovable cliffs on one of Waiheke’s most public and busy stretches of beach made this project undesirable to many. Perseverance and design nous, however, showed how to maximise the use of a difficult site for exceptional architectural and planning results.

Homes

Bunker House

Named the 2025 Home of the Year, this unmissable yet small beach house took 14 years to complete.

Homes

Home of the Hills

In the Bay of Plenty settlement of Te Puna, a compact dwelling channels the enduring architectural language of the rural shed — robust and quietly attuned to its landscape.

Homes

Tractor House

The latest Studio John Irving Architects addition to the Tara Iti golfing compound is a restrained, single-level courtyard house with an old red tractor at its heart.

Homes

Textured Bach

A hillside sculpture in which to live and work, this family home and office — the 2024 City Home of the Year — is generous in places, intimate in others.

Homes

Waimauku House

Named the 2023 Home of the Year, this expansive family home stretches across a quiet valley on the outskirts of Auckland. Conceived as both sanctuary and stage, it gathers a series of spaces in a linear procession — anchoring, protecting and embracing the rhythms of daily life.

Homes

Maungakiekie House

A home for a family of five on the edge of a park. A bucolic landscape, a busy city road, and a house the intermediary; a unified buffer between.

Homes

Sandboxes

Two buildings — one beneath the canopy, the other hovering above it — occupy a steep pōhutukawa-clad site on Auckland’s wild west coast.

Homes

Bird/Seed House

A 150m² off-grid home for two on Waiheke Island. Birdlife abounds; vegetables are grown and harvested on site year-round.

Homes

Panorama

Set on a steep coastal site at the end of a peninsula, this multi-generational holiday home is broken down into two dwellings — connected by an underground tunnel and wine cellar.

Read More »

Since 1936 HOME has showcased New Zealand residential architecture; homes that are designed to inspire, challenge and delight, by the country’s best architects.


In every issue we invite our readers into these homes, telling their owners’ stories at the same time as explaining how these remarkable buildings came to be.


Simultaneously, HOME celebrates New Zealand’s best design, interiors and landscapes – every element of the places we call home. It explores the wealth of creative talent that exists in New Zealand and our evolving built environment.


HOME is a highly collectible and beloved part of people’s lives; at once contemporary and timeless, thoughtful and stimulating.


With its contemporary look and feel and omni-channel offering, it holds its own at the forefront of our media landscape.

Entries to Home of the Year 2024 are now open.

Home of the Year is an annual programme that celebrates the country’s best new homes, and comes with a $10K prize for the overall winner.

Click here to enter, or to find out more about the 2024 awards programme.

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In the Coromandel, a home with a humble profile and a thoughtful design makes the most of a stunning location.

This sculptural Northland bach is a perfect north arrow on a remote farm high above the sea.

Built with awe-inspiring attention to detail, this Arrowtown home is a fresh interpretation of a familiar Otago rural vernacular.

Part gallery, part sculptural abode, this award-winning home above Takapuna Beach is surprisingly secluded.

A hilltop home in Dunedin becomes a gallery of sorts, its form an object of art itself – one of warmth, playfulness, and urbanity.

With the sun on its bow and the community at its stern, this is a house in which the elements are always front of mind.

A mature and restrained response to an awe-inspiring location. The architect has combined a wide range of influences — from Sri Lankan to,

This Auckland home delightfully reimagines city living, marrying privacy with insightful and intimate layers of connection.