Homes

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.

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.

Could there be a better design than a courtyard house to flex with the whims of the Auckland weather? Cue a double-courtyard design.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.