Mangakuri Home by Makers of Architecture
Aotearoa’s dynamic landscape is dotted with rural settlements — microcosms of raw natural beauty that the country is known for. Mangakuri in Hawke’s Bay is one of those places.
Aotearoa’s dynamic landscape is dotted with rural settlements — microcosms of raw natural beauty that the country is known for. Mangakuri in Hawke’s Bay is one of those places.
Long and low on the crest of a vineyard-covered hill, this Hawke’s Bay home by Clarkson Architects unfolds across a series of richly layered spatial and material experiences.
In Wānaka, where alpine peaks meet the enduring traditions of year-round holiday living, Johnston Architects has reimagined the familiar crib for a new generation.
Kuroi Ma translates to ‘black void’, an apt name for a home that exists as a paradox: recessive in tone yet vivid in its context, it is the only one of its kind within a dense and growing subdivision, where a sea of interchangeable brick-and-tile homes stretches across the landscape.
The homestead at Mt Cardrona Station by Leuschke Group Architects takes its cues from the wool-sheds and mining structures of the Cardrona Valley, but the charm and uniqueness of the project lies in how those references are carried inside.
This mid-century property, known as Brightwater, is full of quirks — from its aerodynamic uplifted soffits to an underground doomsday bunker — so, when it came to designing a new kitchen, designer Katie Scott wanted it to be equally quirky and sympathetic to its original 1960s charm.
The 2026 Interior of the Year, designed by Auckland studio Material Creative, transforms a 1970s home in Vancouver, Washington into a richly layered, hotel-inspired retreat where bold colour, nostalgic glamour, and New Zealand design sensibilities converge.
The year's best bathroom is part of an extensive renovation that reflects on the family’s long history with this site on a quiet, leafy street in Auckland’s Herne Bay; a very personal sanctuary where memory and materiality converge.
Sited between three significant heritage buildings in Parnell, One Saint Stephens earns its place in this category through both the quality of the interior life it creates and the statement it makes from the street.
A house by Crosson Architects on a former Ti Point farm draws on the volcanic geology and coastal curvature of the Rodney landscape to ground itself — robustly but lightly — in a place shaped by deep geological time.
Could there be a better design than a courtyard house to flex with the whims of the Auckland weather? Cue a double-courtyard design.
M is for ‘Martinborough’, for ‘monolithic’, for ‘minimal.’ In this holiday house, where the owners instil singular focus into everyday rituals, it is also for ‘moments to mark.’
Utilitarian forms and understated elegance collide in this rural Queenstown Lakes home by RTA Studio.
On the banks of the Avon, PRau's material choreography turns a private residence into a study in considered restraint.
On Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, where wind-bent Moonah trees give way to sweeping views across Bass Strait and the distant Melbourne skyline, Norfolk Residence engages the landscape with an alluring confidence.
With a generous relationship to its streetscape, a rich material palette and an imaginative approach to the vernacular, this home by Roberts Gray Architects is a mature addition to Wānaka and the wider architectural vocabulary.
A low-slung, linear form recessed into the foothills of the Southern Alps. A semi-subterranean minor dwelling, and a family home that creates a strong and almost symbiotic relationship with the alpine landscape.
Perched above a cliff edge, where parkland softens into water, this reworked 1980s home is a careful act of continuation.
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.
Aotearoa’s dynamic landscape is dotted with rural settlements — microcosms of raw natural beauty that the country is known for. Mangakuri in Hawke’s Bay is one of those places.
Long and low on the crest of a vineyard-covered hill, this Hawke’s Bay home by Clarkson Architects unfolds across a series of richly layered spatial and material experiences.
In Wānaka, where alpine peaks meet the enduring traditions of year-round holiday living, Johnston Architects has reimagined the familiar crib for a new generation.
Kuroi Ma translates to ‘black void’, an apt name for a home that exists as a paradox: recessive in tone yet vivid in its context, it is the only one of its kind within a dense and growing subdivision, where a sea of interchangeable brick-and-tile homes stretches across the landscape.
On the shores of Lake Rotoiti, this holiday home draws on the region’s rich geological history — from the magma deep beneath the earth’s surface to the mossy greens and pristine blues of the forest and lake.
On a rugged stretch of State Highway 1, part-way between Kaikōura and Blenheim, where steep hills fall towards the Pacific and weather shapes the land with force, Three Sixty Architecture has devised something entirely fitting — and particularly appealing.
Emerging from the Te Ārai dunes as two rammed earth pavilions offset to reconcile sun path and sea view, the Double Courtyard House responds to its landscape by, literally, being made from it.
The homestead at Mt Cardrona Station by Leuschke Group Architects takes its cues from the wool-sheds and mining structures of the Cardrona Valley, but the charm and uniqueness of the project lies in how those references are carried inside.
This mid-century property, known as Brightwater, is full of quirks — from its aerodynamic uplifted soffits to an underground doomsday bunker — so, when it came to designing a new kitchen, designer Katie Scott wanted it to be equally quirky and sympathetic to its original 1960s charm.
The 2026 Interior of the Year, designed by Auckland studio Material Creative, transforms a 1970s home in Vancouver, Washington into a richly layered, hotel-inspired retreat where bold colour, nostalgic glamour, and New Zealand design sensibilities converge.
The year’s best bathroom is part of an extensive renovation that reflects on the family’s long history with this site on a quiet, leafy street in Auckland’s Herne Bay; a very personal sanctuary where memory and materiality converge.
A Hawke’s Bay family set out to transform their Bluff Hill cottage into boutique accommodation, but, as the design progressed, they fell in love with it and decided to make it their permanent home.
The blue palette, carried seamlessly from interior to exterior, ultimately reads as its own neutral, while spatial reconfigurations throughout the home reclaim under-utilised volumes and deepen connections to the landscape and coastal aspect.
Sited between three significant heritage buildings in Parnell, One Saint Stephens earns its place in this category through both the quality of the interior life it creates and the statement it makes from the street.
A house by Crosson Architects on a former Ti Point farm draws on the volcanic geology and coastal curvature of the Rodney landscape to ground itself — robustly but lightly — in a place shaped by deep geological time.
Could there be a better design than a courtyard house to flex with the whims of the Auckland weather? Cue a double-courtyard design.
M is for ‘Martinborough’, for ‘monolithic’, for ‘minimal.’ In this holiday house, where the owners instil singular focus into everyday rituals, it is also for ‘moments to mark.’
Utilitarian forms and understated elegance collide in this rural Queenstown Lakes home by RTA Studio.
In the heart of Auckland’s wine country, this home by and for an architect explores an unusual premise: an architectural home delivered on a modest budget in partnership with a group home builder — and the result is intriguing.
Geometrically crisp against an organic backdrop, this Wānaka home is a confident expression; the result of clients who knew what they wanted and an architect who added the visual poetry.
On the banks of the Avon, PRau’s material choreography turns a private residence into a study in considered restraint.
On Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, where wind-bent Moonah trees give way to sweeping views across Bass Strait and the distant Melbourne skyline, Norfolk Residence engages the landscape with an alluring confidence.
With a generous relationship to its streetscape, a rich material palette and an imaginative approach to the vernacular, this home by Roberts Gray Architects is a mature addition to Wānaka and the wider architectural vocabulary.
A low-slung, linear form recessed into the foothills of the Southern Alps. A semi-subterranean minor dwelling, and a family home that creates a strong and almost symbiotic relationship with the alpine landscape.
Perched above a cliff edge, where parkland softens into water, this reworked 1980s home is a careful act of continuation.
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 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.
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.
An urban treehouse in the heart of Auckland, this project reimagines how architecture can engage with nature in a dense urban setting.
A sophisticated, elegant, and entirely relaxing gem that shines above Waiheke Island.
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.
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.
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.
A much-loved beachfront bach in Whangaparāoa is redesigned as a refined coastal home.
Occupying a remarkable site above Leigh, this house by Crosson Architects approaches the landscape with admirable restraint.
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.
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.
Named the 2025 Home of the Year, this unmissable yet small beach house took 14 years to complete.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Two buildings — one beneath the canopy, the other hovering above it — occupy a steep pōhutukawa-clad site on Auckland’s wild west coast.
A 150m² off-grid home for two on Waiheke Island. Birdlife abounds; vegetables are grown and harvested on site year-round.
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.
For the couple who bought this apartment in the heart of the city, the brief to rework their dwelling — set within a ten-floor building — was simple: a sanctuary that offered comfort and ease while they visited family, and the freedom to lock up and leave.
Japanese-influenced, this shingle-clad small holiday home is an exercise in restraint, minimalism and inherent warmth.
Having found a generous plot of land in Remuera, Auckland architect and owner Paul Clarke of Studio2 Architects set out to design a ‘forever home’ — one that paid homage to the past while embracing the present and preparing for the future.
There’s a quiet poetry embedded in the landscape surrounding this home — a subtlety that has been translated into form by Rowe Baetens Architecture. Drawing from the nearby volcanic terrain, the architects have created a spatial and material language that is deeply grounded in place.
Cantilevering dramatically towards the water, this design defies the constraints of a steep site, anchoring the heart of the home to the land.
Julian Guthrie reimagines a beachfront home in Pauanui, transforming what was once a 1970s party pad into a refined, minimalist escape.
In one of the most stringent heritage-zoned streets of Herne Bay, Hoxha Bailey Architects faced an arduous task: securing approval for a substantial addition to a prominent double-fronted villa.
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.
Expressive geometries, a high level of craft, and connections with its landscape elevate a small number of materials into a polished, relaxed home full of moments of wonder and surprise.
This sophisticated home by Case Ornsby is a sculptural response to the Waipara Valley’s unique geology.
Set on a long, narrow site in Papamoa this family home takes full advantage of its coastal position while negotiating a demanding footprint.
A building of the South Pacific. A sculptural pavilion of asymmetry that came first. A trio of pavilions, one for living and two for sleeping, that came second. A place for contemplation; spaces for restoration.
An exploration of materiality, a celebration of craft, and a desire to create a memorable sculpture within a tight, city-fringe context have resulted in this multi-award–winning home by Jack McKinney Architects.
Gel Architects have transformed a long-abandoned, dilapidated church into four refined apartments, deftly balancing ecclesiastical gravitas with a dose of contemporary cool.
Conceived as a sleepout for guests, this adjunct to a holiday home is an amalgamation of utilitarian materials, functionality, whimsy, and zen vibes.
A triangular form bedded into the hillside. A place to enjoy a slower pace of life. A warm home; a living roof, soft timbers, light stalks.
A seemingly simple, two-bedroom box on stilts above a precipice in Rangiputa hides a microscopic level of detail and clear-headed architectural thinking.
A mature pōhutukawa and Scandinavian influences have come together in this jaw-dropping property on Auckland’s North Shore.
On a rugged, bush-covered site on Waiheke’s east coast, Chris Tate envisaged a floating pavilion — crisp and minimal; an expression of geometric clarity; a vehicle for relaxation, at one with the land and the sea.
In the heart of Ōrākei, RTA Studio has designed a striking addition to a well-known streetscape. Powerful, enigmatic, and dynamic, its jagged roofline and folded steel form float above the land, inviting observation and curiosity.
High above Little Vivian Bay on Kawau Island, a convivial pavilion sits long and low in a forest of kānuka — part kinetic sculpture, part holiday home.
Managing the balance between architecture and ostentation can be a tightrope. It’s something that José Gutiérrez thinks deeply about.
Architect John Irving is well known for his work at Te Arai and Tara Iti — architecture deftly defined by proportion, sculpture, and light. His homes in this revered coastal region share an understanding of place: open to the sea air and defined by a sense of understated luxury.
A game of attractive opposites: Georgian and modernist, feminine and masculine, barn and villa — this elegant home by Ponting Fitzgerald Architects finds a sweet balance in its inherent tension.
A measured expansion and renovation by Studio John Irving Architects has lent theatricality, elegance, and soul to a tired villa on Auckland’s North Shore.
Do the maths and this 60-metre by 6-metre house adds up to the complete package. At 360 square metres, it delivers 360-degree living — as holistic as it is whole.
Perched on the banks of the Waikato River, this home by Chow Hill Architects resists a singular orientation. With no real front or back, it’s conceived as a structure to be appreciated from all angles.
In Wānaka, this holiday home’s interior by Strutt Studios relies on a touch of Bauhaus and a lot of bravery for a refreshing and forward-thinking design.
Set among protected wetlands on the Kāpiti Coast, this rural home by Studio Pacific Architecture uses sculpture, environmental nous, and scale for a living environment that is full of heart.
It’s not often that dormer windows and brutalism are aligned in the same building, but this house on the Pauanui Waterways is not your usual combination of architectural ingredients.
A house hyper-focused on hygge and family gatherings comes together in Wānaka under the architectural direction of Eliška Lewis Architects.
Two simple pavilions have been stitched together with moments of wonder and era-specific influences in this house on the coast.
Sandwiched between a golf course and Mount Maunganui beach is a house that resonates with a cherished history, while firmly facing the future.
The full range of Aotearoa’s architectural talents are on display in the shortlist for the 2025 New Zealand Architecture Awards.
An Otago home by RTA Studio that manipulates linear plan and form to create a dynamic architectural expression.
A sculptural and immersive architectural response to the enduring presence of Rongokako.
Johnstone Callaghan Architects has designed a playful and daring home for an industry insider wanting to slow down and be surrounded by high levels of craftsmanship in entirely unexpected ways.
In a project in suburban Auckland, Crosson Architects looks backwards to create a bespoke house with a great sense of humour.
Scandinavian aesthetics meet antipodean views in a South Island home an architectural designer conceived for herself.
Until recently, this 1960s home sat squarely at the centre of a generous site in the Auckland suburb of St Heliers.
Modernist proportions and a dramatic cantilever work in tandem to lend gravitas and lightness to this Hawke’s Bay home by Daniel Marshall Architects.
An object of pure geometry in a vast mountainscape, this Otago home rejects distinctions between interior and exterior spaces.
The master plan of a dwelling comprising three separate buildings, originally conceived in the 1990s, has been completed by Sumich Chaplin Architects linking the three into an impressive lakeside home.
Designing for a site in the glowing headlands of Te Rae Kura, +MAP Architects envisaged a home that could be sailed like a ship — a place of manual interventions, and one in close dialogue with the area’s long and fascinating history.