A stunning aluminium-clad home, a spacious hospitality facility, a technically complex hospital and a masterfully planned beachside crib have all nabbed top honours at the Southern Architecture Awards, held on Friday, 12th August at the Arrowtown Athenaeum Hall.

A total of 17 projects received a prestigious Te Kāhui Whaihanga New Zealand Institute of Architects Southern Architecture Award across seven categories. Six projects also received a Resene Colour Award.

Southern jury convenor, Barry Condon of Condon Scott Architects, said the judges had an incredible selection of quality projects that were of an outstanding calibre.

“Every year, the NZIA awards draw together the very best of Southern architecture, and this year was no exception. There was a very fine line separating winners, with a high level of technical complexity and careful attention to detail across projects in all categories. From innovative small project architecture — to rich and community-focused commercial projects — it was very clear that the Southern region is consistently producing bold, innovative designs that we could see easily sitting at a national level”.

The five-person jury visited 25 shortlisted projects before selecting the 17 winners.

See above for images of the shortlisted projects, which are:

Housing

Terrace Edge by Anna-Marie Chin Architects

The architect has taken the alpine vernacular of the gable form and given it a contemporary twist in this spacious home overlooking Lake Hayes. The plan creates separate spaces for a family of three adults, connected by corridors that display a creative appreciation for materiality and design. While the alpine landscape plays a clear role in the material selections, the delivery is pleasantly unexpected, with a mix of schist, metal, glazing and timber creating a refined textural experience inside and out.

Crown Range Retreat by Assembly Architects

Beautifully austere, standing sentinel in the harsh alpine climate, this family home with its minimal palette of raw materials exudes warmth and texture. Uneven patterns in the locally sourced rammed earth walls contrast with a precise concrete datum, with changing levels that follow the landform. Materials flow seamlessly from interior to exterior, creating a restrained, concise, and masterfully executed architectural form.

Cliffs Road House by bell + co architecture and Saunders Architecture

An austere aluminium exterior, unrelenting in its formal expression, contains a revelatory interior, tuned to the owner’s visual wit in an equally uncompromising way. The combination of the two creates a dualistic delight, demonstrating the architectural rewards of collaboration with a highly skilled client. Every surface, colour and material choice is deliberate, exact, surprising and inspiring.

Resene Colour Award:

The interior of this house is a masterclass in colour, with delightful and unexpected combinations throughout. Colours are expressed in a three-dimensional way, wrapping from floors to walls and furniture in bold blocks. The palette changes with the variation in floor level. The result is bright, brave, and perfectly pitched.

Lower Shotover House by Bureaux

Hearty exterior materials give this hill-hugging, river-gazing house a sense of sturdy permanence, accentuated by a tussocked roof. Inside the architects have achieved a balance of comfort and luxury, with a free-flowing floor plan and a suite of creature comforts. A harmonious material palette — chosen for richness, warmth and texture — is minimised to allow for the expression and celebration of natural characteristics. Timeless and robust, this is a house to be appreciated by future generations.

Jack’s Point Retreat by Mason & Wales Architects

A stone fortification from afar, this home sits embedded in its landscape as a playful allusion to an imaginary history. A carefully arranged sequence of spaces creates connection in an informal way, with a vernacular approach to planning that suggests a building that has evolved slowly over time. The textural beauty of Glenorchy stone, used predominantly throughout, provides a sculptural quality and surface richness that evokes the local landscape. The house achieves grandeur without grandiosity.

Ross Campion House by Rafe Maclean Architects

Cleverly formed for the movements of a young family on a tight site and budget, this home is an exercise in exceptionally well-considered spatial planning and dynamic design. Not one square metre is wasted here, with pocketed play areas, functional spaces, and surprisingly spacious bedrooms. Most notably, a roof deck doubles the house’s usable space and provides unexpected lake views over the neighbouring roofs. Folded from deep red corrugated steel, the form takes on a playful aesthetic that is in keeping with the creativity inherent in its design.

Resene Colour Award:

With a nod to the classic barn, this Scoria-red home is a welcome sight in a tight Wanaka subdivision. Wrapping around the roof and walls, the coloured corrugate gives the home a legible architectural form, while internally, contrast is provided by green doors and ply walls, resulting in a quintessential DOC-hut aesthetic.

Vineyard House by RTA Studio

A house configured as a couple of sheds, is as humble as an apple crate. Organised around the simple domestic needs of an elegant bachelor, one shed is for living and one is for sleeping. This clarity of purpose disguises the intelligence and skill of its assembly. Great care has been taken to achieve a rich spatial quality in a way that appears matter of fact and practical. A simple material palette is celebrated. The home sits nicely in dialogue with its productive rural landscape.

Speargrass House by Sumich Chaplin Architects

This home for a young family provides delight in its variations of and departures from, a familiar typology. The gabled form of the main living space is carefully articulated with unexpected apertures to respond to views and to daylight. The house has a charming meandering quality as it winds around a courtyard garden. Texturally rich and with perfect scale, the architecture creates a welcoming shelter within a grand landscape.

Commercial Architecture

Holiday Inn Queenstown Remarkables Park by Plus Architecture

An exercise in considered planning, the architects have created multi-use spaces in this Frankton hotel that are comfortable and inviting in scale. The move to activate the lobby by providing public street access to the bar and restaurant gives the hotel a vibrant atmosphere. This is accentuated by residential-style, cohesive interior design, with pops of bold colour derived from the surrounding landscape, and an exterior façade that is crisp and respectful of the mountains beyond.

Hospitality

EBB-DUNEDIN by Gary Todd Architecture

Art and architecture combine in this unique concept hotel. A bold move from the architects inverts the usual atrium and lobby areas, truly bringing the outside in and providing green spaces and copious natural light. Refined metalwork detailing, art gallery walkways and clever pockets of landscaping contribute to an undeniably special experience for guests. A creative solution for privacy sees a large-scale artwork on the glazed curtain walls transform the building into an elegant installation for downtown Dunedin.

Resene Colour Award:

A façade of curtain glass artwork - printed panels in shades of blue and grey - blur the silhouettes within the hotel. Dramatic green for the interior atrium walls grounds the centre. As your eye follows the natural greenery growing upwards, we see a strong black and white contrasting palette, perfect for showcasing local art.

Public Architecture

Southern Cross Central Lakes Hospital by Warren and Mahoney Architects

A generous and humane spirit drives this healthcare project. A technically complex building that is highly functional and efficient has been delivered. But what stands out is the care that has been paid to the user experience throughout, elevating the project above the utilitarian norm. The warm, abstract formal language of the exterior has set a useful precedent for its newly established neighbourhood.

Resene Colour Award:

A gentle colour palette of soft natural tones has been employed to provide a sense calm, counteracting the clinical norm of healthcare interiors. This attention to colour and materiality extends throughout the building, encompassing entry, theatre and recovery areas. Colour has been used as an active agent to assist wellbeing.

Planning and Urban Design

Holiday Inn Express & Suites Queenstown by McAuliffe Stevens

Utilising a clever planning strategy, this transformation of a residential city block seeks to address the perennial Queenstown issue of seeking northern light whilst addressing a sloping site with many planning and infrastructure constraints. Despite changing planning parameters and a major arterial route shifting from the west to the eastern side of the block over the project’s lifetime, the building seamlessly deals with varied street scales, which are cleverly integrated into a larger urban framework and formed around a central courtyard space.

Education

Te Kura Pakihi - Otago Business School by Mason & Wales Architects

From what was once an enclosed and problematic space, comes this light-filled, activated campus. Through layout and transformative reuse of the existing structure, the architects have created a building that invites all students in and brings staff out of their offices — encouraging collaboration and communication and bringing a sense of promise to its now-bustling spaces. In a hero move — one that makes you wonder why it was ever different — the rear wall is opened up with glazing for views over the canal, lending a sense of place.

Richard Hudson Kindergarten by McCoy and Wixon Architects

Greeted with small-scale hugs, the jury appreciated the considered arrangement of spaces in this Dunedin kindergarten. Planning brings natural light into the interior spaces and accentuates flow of movement for the children who spend their time here, with staff facilities situated for the subtle but essential view of the playground. Sheltered fringe space creates opportunities for outdoor play in adverse weather, and materials are suitably chosen for visual warmth, robustness and longevity.

Small Project Architecture

Karitane Crib by First Light Studio

This new iteration of a well-loved beachside crib provides space for all the family — comfortably sleeping up to fourteen in a small footprint. The architects have taken the idea of outdoor living to a new level, with the central kitchen and dining zone created as a malleable extension to the deck spaces on either side. Delightful design details in the form of lighting and colour elements give this home its own personality. Clever use of space sees bedrooms transformed into living rooms, and window seats used as both beds and indoor/outdoor seating, resulting in a dynamic and family-focused holiday home.

Resene Colour Award:

Subtle colour is injected into the interiors of this multi-tasking, extended-family-friendly beach crib by way of painted doors and walls, custom panels and upholstery fabrics. Coded to reference the direction of the sun and the sea, elements of burnt orange, bold yellow, forest green and grey blue bring contrast and warmth to the timber-lined rooms.

The Coast House by Stacey Farrell Architect

With a contemporary twist, this small house at the bottom of the world is an exercise in creativity and integrity. Designed to be unassuming, the entranceway is bookended by two angled storage spaces, leading into a home that is dedicated to cosy moments and enjoyment of the outdoors. Care is taken to minimise the impact on the surrounding environment with a small footprint and impressive thermal performance. Along with a naturally rich colour palette, creatively budget-friendly materials such as exposed SIPS panels and steelwork highlights contribute to the snug atmosphere of this escape pad.

Resene Colour Award:

The rich interior texture is further enlivened by a palette of colours — black, brown, gold, and green, which all unite to create an intimate crib experience.

Emerald Bluffs Guest House by RTA Studio

A spectacular yet modest intervention on the landscape. The architect provided a plan with expert manipulation of small spaces, allowances for daylight, and a thoughtful use of materials. Heavyweight masonry walls and detailing anchor the form, and provide privacy from the main house, which then gives way to a glass façade that opens up to the bush and blurs the lines of inside to outside. The project kindles a feeling of being on a retreat and then realising you can live this way all year around.

The NZIA Local Awards 2022 programme is supported by Resene and APL.