The poetry of design
20 September 2023
Architect Tony Koia let this house take its own form — from the immediate landscape, the views, and the mountains and lake in the distance.
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Architect Tony Koia let this house take its own form — from the immediate landscape, the views, and the mountains and lake in the distance.
The success of any project often comes down to the level of collaboration and the working relationships between client, builder and architect. In the same way a well-built home provides a better environment for living, so too does a well run project team produce better outcomes.
The highly coveted list of finalists is revealed! Peruse the homes and vote for the project you believe should win the 2023 HOME Interior of the Year Readers’ Choice Award.
This family home offers both a departure from and a nod to the small concrete-block homes that used to be dotted along the coastal roads of Takapuna.
In a rural setting that feels far removed from the city on the outskirts of which it is located, this Auckland home unfolded over a decade or so.
On an east-facing clifftop an hour north of Auckland, this home is the culmination of a long-held dream for its owner.
Using splashes of colour and external materials that evoke memories while creating a synergy with the surrounding landscape, this bach built to passive house standards delivers a lot in a joyful and fascinating way.
This highly sculptural home just outside Queenstown reaches out and responds to the water below and the peaks that rise around it.
A couple of kilometres north of central Wellington, on a ridgeline in Wadestown, architects Seear-Budd Ross envisioned a space of calm: serene rooms with restrained detailing.
Between harbour and hills, this large, low-slung Wellington home is an intriguing but perfectly suited addition to its Eastbourne street.
Mimicking the angles and formation of a canvas tent, this family bach in Tairua pleats and folds, burying its lines into the dunescape.
There’s no doubt this large family home makes a statement. It’s a talking point for locals who wander past and often stop to take it in. Although its scale seems perfectly fitting, it is the form that creates intrigue.
Above an idyllic pohutukawa-fringed Northland bay, this family bach provides what is needed and nothing more.
Architectural designer Ben Brady creates a modern take on rural living for a couple who had lived on the same land for 40 years. Situated in Spotswood, a region known for its pastoral history, the home is designed to make better use of the site’s beautiful rural setting.
The New Zealand Institute of Architects Local Architecture Awards have started to be announced for 2023. Here’s a look at the some of the winning houses in Wellington and Canterbury.
On the shores of Wellington Harbour, this home for a young family was designed to embrace its coastal surroundings while feeling lofty and contemporary.
Appearing to both float above and disappear into the land, this Tāwharanui holiday home is a place of tension and beauty.
This home that steps down a bush-covered hillside in what is arguably one of the most beautiful places in New Zealand is both a statement and a piece of architecture that recesses subtly into the beauty of the landscape that surrounds it.
Simplicity, spatial articulation, and a nearly microscopic attention to detail ensure this coastal Mount Maunganui home by Brendon Gordon Architects and Weekday Studio works beautifully for its inhabitants.
Turning its face to forest and sea, this holiday home is devised as a basic shelter — albeit one of grand proportions and an undeniably alluring simplicity — that rises to every occasion.
We explore a home on the Coromandel Peninsula designed by Sophie Hamer, in which simple architecture becomes exceptional by its detailing.
Delivering a series of beautifully proportioned spaces, this humble Mangawhai bach is quiet and rustic, underpinned by Japanese influences.
On the west coast of the North Island, just outside New Plymouth, a group of residential properties operate independently, but together make up a vast country estate that doubles as a working farm.
High on a cliff between Red Beach and Orewa, this family home delivers something beautifully unexpected.
Being surrounded by and connected to nature was a necessity for this family bach on a South Island lakefront.
A beach house in Whangamatā that is designed for multiple generations, long summer days and neighbourly conversations.
W Hamilton Building took on the daunting challenge of constructing Cliffs Road House, the 2023 City Home of the Year.
This contemporary country home in Central Otago is a place of unrivalled beauty, extending out towards and sitting in unity with the dramatic peaks of its low-lying alpine site.
Looking up at the 2023 Home of the Year, the connection between the built form and the surrounding environment is palpable.
Delivering an unrivalled combination of versatility and durability, the latest technically advanced cladding systems allow for new levels of design freedom when it comes to vertical cedar weatherboards.
An admiration for Japanese architecture and Frank Lloyd Wright’s prairie houses formed the basis of a brief that described a timeless house with reference to these two seemingly diverse design influences.
Nestled into a hillside in Island Bay, two homes – one behind the other – were designed to encourage connection between their inhabitants, and with the beach below.
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.
Reclaiming an old DOC carpark on the shore of Lake Hawea, this holiday home that opens to the sky is designed around a farming family’s get-togethers in the South Island.
A hilltop home in Dunedin becomes a gallery of sorts, its form an object of art itself – one of warmth, playfulness, and urbanity.
In central Auckland, BVA Studio designs an elegant addition defined by a cascading, flowering green roof that meets copper, dark-stained timber and concrete.
Encompassing an original — and much-loved — stone building, two apartments deliver a delightful dialogue between old and new, making the most of a lakefront site in central Queenstown.
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.
Beautifully sited in a rural setting of mature trees, a large pond, and horse paddocks, this strong and elegant house has a calmness and certainty of place and purpose.
Architect Brady Gibbons expertly incorporated the key elements of the coast, a winding stream, and the need for shelter from the harsh climate into the design of this home. The vertical cedar cladding, combined with sliding screens, gives the house its unique exterior character.
Climb Mount Manaia and the triangular form of this family home appears as a subtle marker in a striking landscape.
On a working farm between Christchurch and Kaikoura, this home artfully utilises Colorsteel cladding to create a dynamic definition within a palette of duality.
In the Coromandel, a home with a humble profile and a thoughtful design makes the most of a stunning location.
Balancing a beachfront site with a unique design presented PRD Construction with one of its more fascinating builds to date.
Resembling a simple shed, this budget-conscious minor dwelling at Waipu is a place of rest and contemplation.
Part Slim Aarons, part Los Angeles hillside paid, this fun and beautifully detailed Christchurch home by PRau is proud of its modernist soul.
Higher density requires not just good design but good manners. This leafy, central-Nelson house by Irving Smith Architects sought to do just that.
A large family home elegantly reaches out to meet Papamoa’s everchanging dunescape, folding indiscernibly into the public realm.
Designed for a couple who are avid surfers, this clever addition on a compact coastal site is both overtly contemporary and entirely sympathetic to its context.
One of the latest offerings on the northern end of Lake Wakatipu is the Great Glenorchy Alpine Base Camp, a place that is down to earth, adventurous, and highly sociable.
On a small, suburban hillside site in Christchurch, the design response for this family home was driven by verticality.
With two clear narratives at play, rural and maritime, this Coromandel home of geometric playfulness has a life of its own.
Poised above a desert-like Central Otago valley full of weather extremes, this house is part Americana, part experiment in slow architecture.
Against the backdrop of Mount Cardrona, and honouring the area’s gold-mining days, a barn-style home is devised as a journey of tactility and colour, mimicking the highly seasonal hues of this well-known rural valley.
Three hundred or so metres above sea level in the far north, Geoff Fraser found the perfect patch of land for his latest house. Completely isolated and about a kilometre from the road, Geoff’s hilltop 15ha site is strewn with large volcanic boulders and surrounded by mature native bush. The air is clean, the views are immense and the solitude is all-consuming.
Tucked away on a rear site in suburban Mt Albert, this double dwelling brings together a collection of materials and moments to deliver a beautifully cohesive whole.
This off the grid house near Geraldine in is heated only with a wetback, despite snow covering the ground for much of winter.
Although this home hangs at a cliff’s edge above a leafy North Shore suburb, the house is all about strength and solidity.
In Ponsonby, a villa is extended around a compact courtyard linking old and new, while a gabled addition floats above a grounded lower level.
This quietly confident and inconspicuously elegant holiday home mimics the forms of Memory Rock on nearby Medlands Beach.
Although this Kapiti Coast home for one by Andrew Sexton Architects is compact, it delivers a multitude of connections to nature.
A rural Canterbury home designed by Bull O’Sullivan for multiple generations pushes boundaries while verging on the cinematic.
A deceptively small abode in a traditional, leafy street reveals its design secrets one at a time in a layered and calm manner.
A large boulder discovered during excavation of a Port Hills site became a central feature of this home designed by architect Ken Powrie for his family.
The simplicity of this rural setting gave way to an expertly conceived design allowing for considered moments of solitude on the lakefront. A charcoal-toned roof and vertical timber cladding ensure the form blends into the hills behind, which are blanketed in verdant natives.
On the edge of Lake Wanaka, Condon Scott Architects designed a home that speaks of its time and place, echoing the hues found in the local environs with a little drama and dance.
The 2022 Home of the Year is Terrace Edge by Anna-Marie Chin Architects, a home of heft and craft near Lake Hayes in Arrowtown.
A sculptural, luxury home with an impressive art collection responds beautifully to its views of Rangitoto Island.
An arts and engineering student and his father rebuild their childhood treehouse bigger, better and almost entirely from recycled materials
A strikingly clear and simple form that rises past many constraints due to site and remoteness. Simple, well detail and clear planning.
Within a suburban and semi-alpine context that is prone to landslides, this home stands out by its aesthetics and passive ethos.
A relatively modest-scale courtyard home that’s both welcoming and well connected to its sloping site. It takes craft and materiality serious
A great response to an urban context in post-earthquake Christchurch. Impressive masterplanning which includes the creation of bump spaces and community creating zones.
The repurposing of a church and its hall into an active, quirky, fun family home that respects its history yet offers something new.
Concealed on a bush-clad hillside site above Piha, the dark facade of this home mimics the tones of the ironsand on the beach below.
This family home, on the edge of Cox’s Bay Reserve in Westmere, Auckland, was conceived as a place of privacy — a contemporary urban abode incorporating considered moments of whimsy.
This home on a golf course in Mangawhai, designed by Studio John Irving, is inspired by an international, relaxed expression of luxury and leisure.
Perched on a cliff above Red Beach in Whangaparoa, this house of blackened concrete and waxed steel delivers an unexpected lightness of form.
Marrying the elegance and style of New York with the outdoors lifestyle of Auckland, this elegant Remuera house delivers the best of both worlds.
This home on Moonlight Bay Road hangs perilously above the Tasman Sae a mere five minutes’ drive from downtown Raglan.
This house by the lake is an expression of both its alpine context and the stylistic DNA of its designers.
On an enviable Northland site, this family home is a place of elegance and light – a sculptural addition to the rural landscape.
To the west, black sand dunes stretch out to meet the Tasman Sea as it hits land; to the east, dense pohutukawa and kanuka sweep up the hills that give a boundary to this rugged coastline.
Raised above the ground, this Auckland house of concrete, cedar, bronze and steel reimagines coastal living in the city.
In the foothills of Karioi, dark cedar cloaks a home surrounded by lush greenery in a vast and encompassing landscape.
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.
Architect Tony Koia let this house take its own form — from the immediate landscape, the views, and the mountains and lake in the distance.
The success of any project often comes down to the level of collaboration and the working relationships between client, builder and architect. In the same way a well-built home provides a better environment for living, so too does a well run project team produce better outcomes.
The highly coveted list of finalists is revealed! Peruse the homes and vote for the project you believe should win the 2023 HOME Interior of the Year Readers’ Choice Award.
This family home offers both a departure from and a nod to the small concrete-block homes that used to be dotted along the coastal roads of Takapuna.
In a rural setting that feels far removed from the city on the outskirts of which it is located, this Auckland home unfolded over a decade or so.
Architect Tony Koia let this house take its own form — from the immediate landscape, the views, and the mountains and lake in the distance.
