Home of the Year
Rural Home of the Year 2026
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Since 1936 HOME has showcased New Zealand residential architecture; homes that are designed to inspire, challenge and delight, by the country’s best architects.
In every issue we invite our readers into these homes, telling their owners’ stories at the same time as explaining how these remarkable buildings came to be.
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Entries to Home of the Year 2024 are now open.
Home of the Year is an annual programme that celebrates the country’s best new homes, and comes with a $10K prize for the overall winner.
Click here to enter, or to find out more about the 2024 awards programme.
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In the Coromandel, a home with a humble profile and a thoughtful design makes the most of a stunning location.
This sculptural Northland bach is a perfect north arrow on a remote farm high above the sea.
Built with awe-inspiring attention to detail, this Arrowtown home is a fresh interpretation of a familiar Otago rural vernacular.
Part gallery, part sculptural abode, this award-winning home above Takapuna Beach is surprisingly secluded.
A hilltop home in Dunedin becomes a gallery of sorts, its form an object of art itself – one of warmth, playfulness, and urbanity.
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.
A mature and restrained response to an awe-inspiring location. The architect has combined a wide range of influences — from Sri Lankan to,
This Auckland home delightfully reimagines city living, marrying privacy with insightful and intimate layers of connection.
