Golden glow
This Auckland home is made up of a trio of individual but allied cubic forms using terracotta, corrugate, and a polycarbonate that positively glows in the dark like an urban lantern.
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This Auckland home is made up of a trio of individual but allied cubic forms using terracotta, corrugate, and a polycarbonate that positively glows in the dark like an urban lantern.
On the shores of Sydney Harbour, New Zealand–born Australian architect Richard Archer devised a home of connections with the water and city beyond
The interior flow of this waterfront, central Auckland apartment has been reimagined by Four Walls Architecture with flow and minimalism in mind.
This North Shore home by JCA Studio is sandwiched between two different layers of building code.
New Zealand’s second apartment complex to have ever achieved the top Homestar rating is an urban experiment focused on people and their place in the land, rather than strictly about architectural form.
From the street, this elegant white house looks like a close cousin of its neighbours. Two peaked gables and a verandah with a bull-nosed roof give a shout-out to the surrounding villas. But all is not as it seems.
On a prominent corner site in central Christchurch, a cuboid brick house bridges the divide between residential and commercial.
On a steep, narrow site in Wellington, this family home cascades down over various levels, connected by a central spine to the north.
A family-centric, semi-courtyard home with an internal, slow, staggered reveal takes pride in its privacy and as an entertainment mecca.
Unfolding across two visually distinct levels, this holiday home on the shore of Lake Rotoiti is envisioned as a winter house — a concrete bunker of sorts nestled into the hillside.
Coastal locations call for special consideration of material and performance. In this case, on a farm on a clifftop in Northland, the site is exposed and the elements are harsh.
Pointing due north, The Dart is a direct and simple response to the topography of Mangawhai’s Bream Tail Farm.
On a clifftop that makes up part of the expansive and undulating land of Mangawhai’s Bream Tail Farm, this sculptural holiday home responds beautifully to its rural and coastal environs.
Inspired by a heritage church, this suburban Christchurch home uses its sinuous form for both impact and functionality.
Bounded by farmland, and beneath a simple gabled form, this home is designed around layered moments of unexpected eccentricity. Surrounded by Cantabrian farmland, the home of two former Christchurch locals delivers unexpected eccentricities within a traditional gabled form. Head southwest out of Christchurch and the city quickly gives way to countryside that offers a quintessential English charm. The roads are narrow, meandering, and surrounded by trees, through which dappled light casts a familiar, unpredictable pattern.
AW Architects has designed a house in Bendemeer with three, very distinct volumes and equally diverse personalities: the birdwatcher, the socialite, and the sheep shearer who’s scrubbed up well.
This certified passive house is the sum of many parts — some conflicting, others converging; but as one, the innate tensions deliver an enviable and powerful presence.
A high-performing holiday home in Wanaka plays with height and light, compression and expansion.
We spoke to architect James Warren of Upoko Architects about the challenges, design, and why tiny homes are gaining popularity.
We spoke to builder Sam McGregor about the tensions and similarities between rammed-earth and passive house methodologies.
A lone Japanese maple defines the seasons in this Wanaka Home. It sits in an intimate courtyard, surrounded by gently sloping rooftops that reach out to the peaks beyond.
On a southern beach where seals come ashore and kārearea hunt, this bunker-like holiday home was designed to tread lightly on the land.
This coastal cabin in Mangawhai Heads has a lot going for it. With 270-degree views out across the ocean and back towards the Brynderwyns, it’s a special place, and the hilltop context of the site meant that there was a myriad of opportunities to explore. Husband and wife duo builder Dave Cuneen and interior designer Fran Cuneen worked with architectural designer Hamish Strirrat to develop a design brief centred on versatility — a home that
We speak to Wellington architect Amanda Bulman of Three Line Architecture who designed Echo House, a certified Passive House on the Kapiti Coast.
The 2021 City Home of the Year, House on Takapuna Beach by CAAHT Studio, met the challenge of the fishbowl effect, as beach goers and dog walkers promenade the sand beyond the site’s border.
New Zealand residential architecture is dominated by the use of timber, both as an exterior cladding and joinery material, and for internal detailing — and there’s good reason for that.
HOME and Peter Fell present: A Modern Stone, an exploration of concrete in the 2021 Home of the Year, Black Quail House by Bergendy Cooke.
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.
The 2021 Rural Home of the Year explores retreat and openness, gracefully unfolding between retired paddock and coastline.
A mature and restrained response to an awe-inspiring location. The architect has combined a wide range of influences — from Sri Lankan to her own, impressive international career — to achieve a quintessentially local response to site, context, and history.
A challenging tight suburban site competently handled via good planning, excellent control of views and nice separation of guest quarters from the main house by bridge.
Although modest in size and budget, this Auckland multi-generational home puts the client at its heart while at the same time future-proofing the asset for any potential uses that might eventuate.
It takes a certain level of daredevilry and nous to convince a client to build a two-bedroomed home for a family of five.
There’s anarchy in Avondale and it looks a lot like Eames, it sounds a bit like Joey Ramone, and it has its heart set on placemaking.
On the edge of a bluff at Palliser Bay, this isolated holiday home stands firm in a sparse landscape.
Mário Luz devises a simple form — three cedar boxes anchored by a central concrete spine — that settles effortlessly into a flat, rural Cantabrian landscape.
Wellington architects Bonnifait + Giesen explore their long-standing fascination with prefab and show how this Gisborne home fits snugly within that evolution.
On a typical Westmere street, this black-clad double-gabled home stands tall — unrecognisable from the original bungalow whose bones were used to form the basis of an extensive renovation.
Promising spectacular views and extreme weather conditions, New Zealand’s alpine architecture considers protection and connection, refuge and openness, with a material palette that reflects the environment harmoniously.
Eight villa renovations in Auckland and Wellington deliver more than meets the eye, and a considered symbiosis between old and new.
Approaching Jerram Tocker Barron Architects to design a new house on one of Nelson’s steepest streets put the owners on a trajectory to conjuring up an intriguing, diamond-pattern facade.
There’s something confronting and powerful about looking out to the horizon and seeing nothing but the ocean, knowing the next major landmass is thousands of kilometres away.
Michael O’Sullivan folds the sun into an arc — a beautifully curved pavilion that responds to a mature garden on a site just north of Christchurch’s central city.
Pastoral stone barns and a black steel butterfly find common ground on an idyllic plateau above Lake Wakatipu.
On a Mangawhai golf course, a glass-box pavilion is ruptured by three inverted cones. Pip Cheshire discusses the ideas and process that turned this seemingly simple concept into something entirely magnetic.
There’s something about clifftop homes in New Zealand. Maybe it’s a sense of living on the edge or the desire to find the most picturesque spot to watch the sunrise. Here are five clifftop homes where the architect has done justice to the dramatic surroundings.
A difficult, yet awe-inspiring site called for a radical solution: breaking a Bay of Islands holiday bach in two.
Lovell & O’Connell Architects devises a rhythmic form that pays homage to a tight Wellington site.
Wrapped in corrugate and spanning just under 110m², this unassuming home on a hill above the small town of Luggate is powerful beyond its volume.
Designed and built by family members, this house in Leigh is steeped in heritage and ancestry.
Tim and Alison Hay first occupied this home around 15 years ago. They had bought the site in north-west Auckland three years earlier when it was an old orchard with a number of paddocks.
John Irving creates a home that falls away to the ocean in Northland. It’s a bit Palm Springs, this house. It’s a bit casual, and it’s a bit dramatic — but only in just the right amounts.
On a bend in the road in a historic area of Remuera, Auckland, this large site had been mostly unused for decades. An original 1930s bungalow had a certain charm, but its layout and orientation didn’t lend itself to contemporary family life — or make the most of the site.
On the divide between suburban street and wild dunescape, Brian White carves a retreat from a singular form.
The nickname “swamp house” expresses the home’s proximity to the marshy paddocks resting below it on the Crown Range between Queenstown and Wanaka but it might give you the wrong idea about the climate on the high, elevated plateau. For Kerr Ritchie’s Bronwen Kerr and Pete Richie it was a challenging climate in which to design a home. “The snow stays on the ground for quite a long time in the winter – it’s really
Bach living is a stripped-back approach to life: family time spent eating, playing board games and puzzles in the evening, and during the day getting outside and enjoying what the natural environment has to offer – water sports, backyard cricket and mountain biking.
A spacious Mid-Century modern-inspired home in Orakei proves that you don’t need a huge amount of land to have four bedrooms and multiple living spaces, particularly when less than half of the home touches the ground.
It’s a familiar story: when youngsters enter the picture, the excitement of the big-city dream tends to pale. Childhood memories of beaches, open space and a more relaxed pace suddenly become irresistible. Expat Luisa Andrew and her Scottish husband Stephen Dewar were living with three young children in a Hong Kong terrace house when they answered the call of Kiwi lifestyle. They decided to build on this Waiake section on Auckland’s North Shore, which they
A Kerr Ritchie–designed home influenced by a love for the outdoors. Liisa hand-made a flag that read “Boys aboard”. The idea was to hoist it onto the mast of their catamaran while approaching a new port, thus alerting other boatie families that young children had arrived and any form of socialising would be welcomed.
Claude Megson’s unique contribution to New Zealand architecture had almost disappeared from view when this house, his masterpiece, was saved from demolition. These days, its many, many doors are thrown open each year to students doing a unit on Megson at the architecture school in Auckland, where he once taught his approach to design. The house, and that unit, does valuable work, exposing new generations to a completely different architectural philosophy, one that was almost
On a leafy site in the Waikato, Tane Cox crafts a subtle home for three generations.
This Kiwi bach was designed as a response to the environment and history of the Coromandel. Discover how this home reflects its surroundings.
On a leafy site in the Waikato, Tane Cox crafts a subtle home for three generations Ben Lee had just finished building four houses on Marine Parade in Mount Maunganui. He was tired. His wife Nicky discovered she was pregnant with the couple’s third child. Suddenly, the smell of grass and the thought of a large section and proximity to parents felt like the lifestyle change they needed. They began searching for a property that
[jwp-video n=”1″] Our annual Home of the Year award is New Zealand’s most prestigious architectural prize, with a cheque of $15,000 going to the winning architects. In celebration of its 25th Anniversary, here’s a look at our previous winners, the Home of the Year hall of fame. 1996 The first-ever winner of our Home of the Year title, in 1996, was the Clifford Forsyth House in the Auckland suburb of Remuera, designed by Patrick Clifford
Faced with a small budget and big design ideas, the PAC Studio team sweated each and every detail, seeking the most efficient plan possible to create this beautifully designed space Q&A with Sarosh Mulla and Aaron Paterson of PAC Studio A modest home and a generous cabin, this is a stripped-back design for PAC. Talk us through its workings. Sarosh Mulla: We don’t believe that money should be a barrier to good design. PAC Studio
With a brief for a home without a garden that sat amongst the vines, Stuart Gardyne discusses how he adopted an elemental design for this Marlborough home Q&A with Stuart Gardyne of Architecture Plus Where did you and the owners start your conversation? Interestingly, the owners said they didn’t want a garden. Maybe a few vegetables, but not a garden. They wanted the house to sit among the vines. That, and a few other requirements,
Architect Ben Daly rehabilitates a farm building with a long family history on the Canterbury Plains. He discusses why he chose to make a shearing shed his home Q&A with Ben Daly of Palace Electric Why did you and Dulia choose this shed to make your home, as opposed to other buildings on the farm? The farmhouse suits the people who live in it currently and we like the idea of building a community. The
We spoke to Louise Wright from Assembly Architects about her recent build in Central Otago which has drawn inspiration from mid-century architecture Q&A with Louise Wright of Assembly Architects How much did the site influence your design? The environment always influences the design. The home is sited to experience the mountain views – to the south, the spectacular and ever-changing Remarkables, and to the north Coronet Peak and Brow Peak above Arrowtown. The site is
Modernist and elemental, this house in a Marlborough vineyard by Stuart Gardyne proves that country living need not be rustic “A paddock with grapevines on it” is Stuart Gardyne’s description of the site in Marlborough’s Omaka Valley, in which this refined yet unpretentious house is found. There are views of the mountains, and neat, regular rows of vines. A few olive trees dot the site, as if to emphasise the many subtle shades of green
Despite this Kaipara Harbour home’s modest budget, PAC studio team managed to create an elegantly rural space for this Auckland commuter In recent years, aspiring first-home buyers in Auckland without a million or two to spend have been faced with a stark choice: move out or give up. In doing the former, some found a lifestyle that turned out to be better than the one they’d left behind – as the owner of this modest
Assembly Architects drew on lightweight Californian modernism to craft this elegant mountain retreat The privilege of living in Central Otago’s dramatic landscape often means making design compromises. Subdivisions in the region tend to have strict covenants – usually requiring gabled rooflines and the use of stone, all of it solidly anchored to the ground by a thick concrete slab. Louise and Justin Wright of Arrowtown’s Assembly Architects were given a welcome opportunity to dodge the
Originally built in the 1960s and left unused for decades, this farm building on the Canterbury Plains is another masterful revival by architect Ben Daly When Ben and Dulia Daly moved back to Dulia’s home town of Christchurch, it wasn’t to the leafy suburbs and wide streets of the city. Instead, they moved back to her family farm, Arborfield, on the Canterbury Plains, a half-hour drive from the city – and into a shearing shed
Tricky site limitations meant the architects of this home needed to get creative with its design. Discover how they achieved such a light and airy home [jwp-video n=”1″] Project House in the vines Architects Bonnifait + Giesen, Atelier Workshop Architects Location Hawke’s Bay Brief Respond to the landscape and design a home for rest, work and play Sometimes, strict covenants can be a blessing in disguise. When architects Cecile Bonnifait and William Giesen of Bonnifait
Paul and Sue Webber found the perfect furniture for their multi-generational Tauranga holiday home; in their son’s furniture showroom – Tim Webber Design Paul Webber— There was originally a little red Fibrolite house on the site that my aunt bought in 1979. My wife Sue and I have been going there for holidays since about 1981 and our kids, Tim and Rachel, have grown up going there every year for holidays. The brief to Paul
Lance and Nicola Herbst take us inside one of their original designs: a 20-year-old bach on Great Barrier Island Q&A with architects Nicola and Lance Herbst What does the bach mean now? Nicola Herbst— We have two separate lives – different sides of the same coin. We have a city existence and a bach existence. They’re a wonderful antithesis, and it has always been like that. It never changes for us. Lance Herbst— A continuum, I
Sitting on fairly public site, this Waiheke Island holiday used clever design and thoughtful material choices to quietly slip from view Q&A with architect John Irving of Studio John Irving You’ve managed to design a home on a fairly public site that’s not only discreet but very private. How did the design for this tricky site unfold for you? We like to keep it simple, and courtyards are brilliant when privacy and shelter are an
Architect Piers Kay of Fearon Hay channelled the intimacy of camping and created a holiday section many would find hard to leave Q&A with architect Piers Kay of Fearon Hay Where do you draw the line on what to include and what not to include within a modest footprint? The starting point from the clients was modest – somewhere to sleep, somewhere to bathe and somewhere to cook and eat. By referencing camping, there was
A notional shed on a jetty was the inspiration for this impressive bach above a beach on Kawau Island Q&A with Sam Caradus of Crosson Architects Tell us about the challenges of building on Kawau. It’s not without its complications. It requires careful planning and a builder who’s engaged and willing. The site is remote and everything needs to be barged over – plus the contractors were going over there and back on a daily
A beach house on Waiheke Island by John Irving quietly slips from view, without having to put up a fence. Here’s how they did it Simplicity is an art form. Making something appear effortless, when the opposite is closer to the truth, takes much more than a sleight of hand. This weekender by John Irving on Waiheke Island is recessive and quiet on its site – quite a feat given its public nature, with the
An unobtrusive Piha home makes the most of its small site in the bush by elevating the sleepout into the air Q&A with Jose Gutierrez of Jose Gutierrez Architecture How does the sleepout work with the original bach and the site? The sleepout is a stand-alone structure at the rear of the site. It sits directly behind the original bach and was elevated to create an open living space below. This platform is not a
The Herbst bach on Great Barrier Island turns 20 this summer. Simon Farrell-Green looks back at how this project was instrumental for their career There are houses that stay indelibly imprinted on your brain. You can remember every step you took, every footfall despite having only been in them once or twice. They become familiar, like a house you’ve spent a lot of time in. For me, one such place is the bach of Lance
Fearon Hay has designed two elegant cabins that redefine what we’ve come to expect from a back-to-basics encampment A few years ago, a couple with young children approached Fearon Hay with their thoughts about building on rural land they’d purchased on the Tawharanui Peninsula. Located on an inlet, big, rolling grassy hills trickle down to the water’s edge. The estuary is not your quintessential ocean-front view for a holiday home and the owners’ approach to
A notional shed on a jetty was the inspiration for this impressive bach above a beach on Kawau Island Bon Accord Harbour is long and deep, cutting more than halfway through Kawau Island, at the northern edge of the Hauraki Gulf. You travel by boat from Sandspit across Kawau Bay and through the heads, into a harbour that’s sheltered on three sides from the prevailing winds. It’s the harbour that boat owners make for during
The home of Pete Bossley and his partner Miriam van Wezel has evolved over 18 years, with outdoor areas being amended to accommodate best use, light and views. Bossley talks us through his manoeuvres Project Outdoor spaces at an architect’s own home Architect Pete Bossley Location Cox’s Bay, Auckland Tell us about the house and its outdoor areas. It was originally a very simple 1930s bungalow, which has been through a couple of iterations. The
An unobtrusive Piha home makes the most of its small site in the bush by elevating the sleepout into the air There’s something magical about Garden Road. It lies at the end of a meandering path – more one-lane access than actual road – that slows you down, physically and mentally. The ‘Garden’ part of the name is at least accurate: big, beautiful pōhutukawa encroach in the loveliest possible way, lilies float on a pond,
Built in place of the original family bach, discover how this Opahi Bay holiday home maximises sunlight and plays homage to childhood memories [jwp-video n=”1″] Project Family holiday home Architect Pat de Pont, SGA Architects Location Opahi Bay, Mahurangi Brief Capture light on a challenging site and build on memories from the original family bach. In the 1940s, Ray McGreal had a bach built and a tennis court laid on land at Mahurangi West. As
Pic Picot, of Pic’s Peanut Butter, had a simple brief for his holiday spot: he didn’t want a house. See how architect Julian Mitchell designed a ‘not-a-house’ for Pic and his family below Project ‘Pic’s Not-a-house’ Architect Julian Mitchell, Mitchell Stout Dodd Location Mārahau, Tasman Bay When Pic Picot engaged architect Julian Mitchell to design something for his holiday section at Mārahau, he told him straight: he didn’t want a house. No house at all. Not
Faced with a difficult alternation, architect Henri Sayes used a clear and uncompromising vision to create this wonderful little apartment. He discusses the design process behind the project Q&A with architect Henri Sayes of Sayes Studio Good clients make good projects and that’s true in this case. Tell us more about that. Not many people would have seen a dilapidated workshop on a sloping, shadowed strip of land and seen the potential. The client drove
Jose Gutierrez responds to a call for a sunken lounge with a clever design that fits the needs of a young family and their friends The brief Justin Mowday— Before the house was renovated, if you were at home during the day you had to have the lights on in every room. Soph, who was pregnant at the time, wanted lots of natural light and for it to feel open. Sophie Mowday— We originally said
The architects from Pac Studio deploy light and fun through materials for a bungalow extension. See its bright yellow floors below Q&A with Dr Sarosh Mulla and Aaron Paterson of Pac Studio How is all that yolkiness on a summer’s day? Sarosh Mulla— Because we’ve got our big projecting verandah, it doesn’t get oppressive. You get reflected light off the floor nearest the dining table, and the yellow light bouncing off the ceiling is really nice