Reimagined glory
Marrying the elegance and style of New York with the outdoors lifestyle of Auckland, this elegant Remuera house delivers the best of both worlds.
Utilitarian forms and understated elegance collide in this rural Queenstown Lakes home by RTA Studio.
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.
Perched above a cliff edge, where parkland softens into water, this reworked 1980s home is a careful act of continuation.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
A 150m² off-grid home for two on Waiheke Island. Birdlife abounds; vegetables are grown and harvested on site year-round.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
