Home of the Year hall of fame

As we hurtle towards sending our Home of the Year 2012 issue to press, we thought it was a good time to review the previous winners of the award, which is now in its 17th year. So here they are - we'd like to live in all of them.

(This year's Home of the Year winner will be revealed in our new issue, on newsstands April 2. Thanks again to our Home of the Year partner, Altherm Window Systems, for their ongoing support of the award.)

First, our 1996 winner: in Auckland, by Patrick Clifford and his colleagues at Architectus. Photograph by Patrick Reynolds.

Our 1997 winner, also in Auckland, was designed by Felicity Wallace. Photograph by Patrick Reynolds.

This house in the Bay of Islands by Pete Bossley won Home of the Year in 1998. Photograph by Patrick Reynolds.

Back in Auckland, architect Gerrad Hall's own home won the award in 1999. Photograph by Patrick Reynolds.

Fearon Hay Architects took the prize for this Bay of Islands holiday home in 2000. Photograph by Patrick Reynolds.

Architect Gerald Parsonson's own family bach on the Kapiti Coast was our 2001 winner. Photograph by Paul McCredie.

Stevens Lawson Architects won the first of their three Home of the Year titles for this Auckland home in 2002. Photograph by Patrick Reynolds.

Architect Ken Crosson's bach on the Coromandel Peninsula won the Home of the Year 2003 award, as well as the Home of the Decade prize (held to mark 10 years of the Home of the Year award) in 2005. Photograph by Patrick Reynolds.

The Home of the Year 2004 was this Bay of Islands holiday home by Pete Bossley. Photograph by Patrick Reynolds.

This house in the King Country by Mitchell & Stout was named Home of the Year 2005.  Photograph by Patrick Reynolds.

The Home of the Year 2006 in Day's Bay, Wellington, was designed by Hugh Tennent. Photograph by Paul McCredie.

This Auckland house by Stevens Lawson Architects was our 2007 Home of the Year. Photograph by Mark Smith.

The 'Signal Box' in Masterton, designed by Melling Morse Architects, was our 2008 winner. Photograph by Paul McCredie.

Mitchell and Stout Architects' Waiheke house was the 2009 Home of the Year. Photograph by Patrick Reynolds.

Our only South Island winner to date, the 2010 Home of the Year is near Wanaka and was designed by Stevens Lawson Architects. Photograph by Mark Smith.

 

Last year's Home of the Year was the Kare Kare house, designed by Michael O'Sullivan of Bull O'Sullivan Architects.

He's here! Still time for tickets...

The international member of our Home of the Year jury, Canadian architect Brian MacKay-Lyons, has just arrived in the country to help choose the winner of the Home of the Year award (the award results will be published in our April/May 2012 issue).
Now this you'll have to see: Brian will be giving public talks at the University of Auckland on Wednesday evening this week and at Victoria University of Wellington on Thursday evening. Tickets are still available at the link here. (You can pick your tickets up at the venues).

Brian is a leading proponent of regionalist architecture - many of his projects line Nova Scotia's rocky shores. He's also a sheep farmer and sea kayaker. His talks promise to be fascinating (Architects get 10 CPD points for attending.) You can view more of his terrific work here. Thanks to our Home of the Year partner Altherm Window Systems for making Brian's visit possible. We hope to see you on Wednesday or Thursday.

Brian MacKay-Lyons: Tickets on sale now!

The international member of our Home of the Year jury, Canadian architect Brian MacKay-Lyons, will visit New Zealand in February to help choose the winner of the Home of the Year award (the award results will be published in our April/May 2012 issue).

He'll be giving talks in Auckland (on February 8) and Wellington (on February 9) when he's here, and tickets are now on sale at the link here. Brian is a leading proponent of regionalist architecture, as well as being a sheep farmer and sea kayaker, so his talks promise to be fascinating (Architects get 10 CPD points for attending.) Thanks to our Home of the Year partner Altherm Window Systems for making Brian's visit possible.

That's Brian below, and a shot of one of his buildings by Greg Richardson. For more information about Brian and his work, you can visit his website here.

Home of the Year - our new promo reel

We announce the winner of our Home of the Year award on August 3 (with the magazine on shelves the next morning), but in the meantime, here's a little tease featuring all 10 shortlisted homes.

This year we've collaborated with the Gibson Group to produce short films of each of the shortlisted homes. We'll be posting the films here on the blog from August 4 as well.

James Timberlake in the Dominion Post

Phew! We're back from our very busy week-long Home of the Year judging tour, with our visiting US architect James Timberlake (below) and New Zealand architect Patrick Clifford. We saw a great diversity of homes, and our thanks go out to the architects and owners of the homes on our shortlist for helping to arrange our visits. The finalists and winner of the Home of the Year award will be revealed in our August/September issue, out August 4.

While we were on the road, James gave talks in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch to a total of around 1,000 people, so thanks to all of you who came along. Highlights of his Auckland presentation will be posted online soon at eboss - we'll let you know when they go live.

In the meantime, James' interview with Hank Schouten of the Dominion Post is online now at the link here. Thanks again to Altherm Window Systems for making James' visit possible.

Events: James Timberlake visits New Zealand

We're delighted to announced that, thanks to the assistance of our Home of the Year partner Altherm Window Systems, James Timberlake of Philadelphia's KieranTimberlake Architects will be the international member of our Home of the Year jury. James (pictured below) will visit New Zealand in the first week of May.

As well as joining Patrick Clifford of Architectus and me (Jeremy) on the tour judging homes shortlisted for the Home of the Year award, James will give lectures in Auckland (on Monday May 2) and Wellington (on Tuesday May 3).  You can purchase tickets to his lectures from Ticketek here.

KieranTimberlake Architects are at the top of their game right now: last year the firm won the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award, and in 2008 they were recognised with the Architecture Firm Award, the highest honour bestowed on a firm by the American Insitute of Architects.

In 2008, the firm developed a prefabricated dwelling (below) commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art for its exhibition Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling.

More recently, KieranTimberlake won the competition to design the new Embassy of the United States in London, shown in the rendering below.

The firm's best-known house is probably the Loblolly house (below) in Maryland, an elegant exercise in using prefabricated components to create a one-of-a-kind house. The image is by Peter Aaron/Esto.



James is the latest in series of esteemed international architects who have visited New Zealand to be on the Home of the Year juding panel, including Charles Renfro, Brendan Macfarlane, Glenn Murcutt, Kerstin Thompson, John Wardle and Ian Moore. We're very grateful all of them have taken the time to come here and share their knowledge and expertise with us. We hope you're able to attend James' lectures, which promise to be fascinating. Last year's events with Charles Renfro sold out quickly, so don't delay. Architects who attend are eligible for 10 CPD points.

Home of the Year 2011 entries

Entries to our annual Home of the Year award close at 5pm this Thursday March 17. As many of you already know, the Home of the Year award is New Zealand's richest architectural prize, with a first prize of $15,000. We welcome submissions from architects and homeowners.

This year we're also delighted to announce the support of our new awards partner, Altherm Windowr. Altherm are also generously supporting the visit of the international member of our Home of the Year jury - whose name we will be revealing later this week.

In the meantime, you can download the Home of the Year entry form here.

Getting heavy

There is an honourable tradition in New Zealand home design that strives for lightness, of timber homes resting lightly on the land. I remember my French teacher at high school saying that when she returned to New Zealand after many years in France, the homes in New Zealand looked as if they could all blow away in the next breeze.

One of the finalists in this year's Home of the Year award makes a case for the European sort of solidity my teacher was referring to. The house is by Stevens Lawson Architects (who won the award with their house by Lake Wanaka, which you can see in an earlier post), built for clients who requested concrete for its heft and its low-maintenance qualities. These photographs by Mark Smith show just how solid this home turned out to be. It is located on a harbourside site in Auckland's eastern suburbs. The elevation below faces the water, with the main bedroom on the upper right, the kitchen and dining space below it, and a covered sitting area extending off the living room on the left-hand-side of this image:

The house is just as sculptural at the entrance, at the bottom of a very steep driveway. This shot gives you a good view of the central 'canyon', a glass-topped, double-height hallway that drags light into the centre of the home. (The house is located beside a slope to the north that blocks sunlight for a few hours in the winter, hence the design of the glass-topped volume to admit more light).

The home was designed using pre-cast concrete panels that feature ribbed details best viewed in this shot of the southern elevation:

The monumental exterior means some of the interiors are just as dramatic. This view shows the inside of the 'canyon' with its glass-topped roof. The timber feature is a 'bridge' across this double-height space.

This shot looks from the dining area across to a living room which in turn opens onto the covered exterior sitting area you can see in the first shot of this post. Inside, the material palette has been kept to a simple combination of timber and concrete with slate floors.

Some of the rooms feature surprising and dramatic devices for admitting light, such as the space in the shot below, which can be used as a home theatre or a snug, cave-like hideaway (there is also a slow window looking out to the water just out of the right-hand-side of the frame). The home may seem intimidatingly hefty from the outside, but as you can see, the interior offers a wide range of views and experiences.

So there you have it - an unashamedly heavyweight house. Sure, it runs contrary to the New Zealand timber tradition, but its engagement with the uniquely New Zealand landscape around it means it doesn't feel as if this is anything other than a New Zealand house.

World Architecture Festival

Exciting news - two homes that have previously featured in our pages have been shortlisted for awards at the World Architecture Festival, to be held in Barcelona in November. One of those houses is Te Kaitaka - the Lake Wanaka retreat by Stevens Lawson Architects, which won our Home of the Year award this year:


You can see some of photographer Mark Smith's shots of the house at an earlier post here: http://homenewzealand.blogspot.com/2010/08/more-shots-of-our-winning-house.html

The other house to be shortlisted at the World Architecture Festival is a holiday home on Great Barrier Island by Paul Clarke of Crosson Clarke Carnachan Architects, which we featured in our December/January issue last year:

You can see more of Simon Devitt's shoot of the house by Paul Clarke at an earlier post here: http://homenewzealand.blogspot.com/2009/12/more-outtakes.html

All the architects are going to Barcelona in November to make presentations about their buildings to the judges.

Congratulations are also due to New Zealand firms that have been shortlisted in other categories. They include Warren & Mahoney, who are shortlisted in the Civic & Community section of the festival for their design of the Supreme Court in Wellington, Auckland's RTA Studio, who are shortlisted in the Learning category for the AUT lecture theatres and conference centre they designed, and Copeland Associates Architects for their design of the Northland Event Centre.

Good luck to everyone involved - and have a great time in Barcelona.

David Mitchell & Julie Stout's studio

As promised earlier (and our apologies for this being a promise we've been slow to deliver on), here are some extra shots of David Mitchell and Julie Stout's studio, which is adjacent to their new house on Auckland's North Shore. The house was the subject of an earlier post, but as the studio is an intriguing structure in its own right, we wanted to share more of Patrick Reynolds' photos of it here.

David and Julie had the studio built before their house, and lived in it while the house went up on the site behind them. They liked the 19th century idea of garden follies, so designed a contemporary version for themselves. In the image below, you can see why some passersby thought the roof had slid off after construction was finished:


Now, the flaxes are flourishing on the roof garden, which makes for a great hangout for tui and a pleasant addition to the view from David and Julie's bathroom, on the third floor of the big house. In the shot below, you can see the inside of the studio, filled with light playing over the honeyed tones of the plywood linings.

The small kitchen is located underneath the mezzanine bedroom:


At one end of the kitchen, a small cutout in the cast concrete walls allows a glimpse of the shallow pool that surrounds much of the house, reflecting dappled patterns of light inside during the day.


Julie says the railings on the mezzanine floor make the world's best drying rack.


Upstairs, a tiny bathroom is tucked behind a glass partition beside the bed. This is a very small space, but its complexity and warmth make it easy to imagine living there, at least for a while. At the moment, Julie and David use it as a space for guests, but it could also be adapted to become a space for working from home, or rented out if necessary ... David and Julie both like the idea of the house being easily adapted to fit their future needs, or those of people who might eventually live in it after they're gone.

Daniel Marshall's other Waiheke house

Many of you who have the Home of the Year issue will already know this, but architect Daniel Marshall has two homes among this year's Home of the Year finalists, both of them on Waiheke Island. We featured one of the homes, at the eastern end of the island, in an earlier post. Let's now take a walk around the outside of the other one, on the island's northern slopes.

As you can see, the vista isn't at all bad. Daniel's response to it combines openness and solidity, with the house anchored firmly to the ground on one side and appearing to float over the Hauraki Gulf on the other. (These photographs are all by Patrick Reynolds). Both the following views from behind the house show the more closed-off, southerly elevation.


As we get closer to the house from the south, you can get a clearer idea of how it is hunkered in beside a small hill to the west.

The view below is from the east, which also shows how the house is protected a little by the hill on its westerly side.

Here, also looking from the east, you can see the strong south-facing wall that imparts a sense of solidity to the home's otherwise glassy interior. At the left of this image, you can see the stone wall that splays out across the driveway, directly visitors up stairs to the house (the garage is buried under the side of the house you can see in this image).

In our next post, we'll take you for a wander around the interior, as well as the courtyards Daniel designed to provide sheltered outdoor seating options on windy days.

Daniel Marshall on Waiheke

The first of two houses by Daniel Marshall on Waiheke Island that are finalists in our Home of the Year award is at Waikopua Bay, at the very eastern end of the island. The house is located at the bottom of an incredibly steep driveway, and faces slightly southeast. Daniel decided to arrange the buildinfs - a carport, the main house and a guest room above a boatshed - around the path of an old stream bed that ran through the site. This creates the feeling of an encampment centred around the sunken courtyard at the rear of the living pavilion. These photographs - most of which we couldn't fit in the article on the house in our Home of the Year issue - are by Simon Devitt.


This view from the water shows the way the building nestles into its site. The Felipe Tohi sculpture out the front provides a useful navigation point, apparently, when guiding the fishing boat back in the evenings.


Daniel chose the black colour for much of the exterior so it would blend in with the dark trunks of the manuka trees behind it.

This view shows the stone wall of the living pavilion that borders the old creek bed and the path between the two structures.

Mitchell & Stout on the North Shore

David Mitchell & Julie Stout's home on Auckland's North Shore is a complex beast, so let's take a slow tour of the exterior, courtesy of our photographer Patrick Reynolds. Here's a view of the house from the street, looking up at the top-floor terrace:

This is a view of the main entrance, sheltered by a large polycarbonate sheet that sends rainwater into the half-pipe you can see in this shot. In rainstorms, the water rockets along it towards the tank:

The polycarbonate sheet in the shot below serves the purpose of lending privacy to the kitchen, without diminishing the amount of light that gets in there. You can see the lower slopes of Rangitoto in the distance in this shot, as well as the home's 'moat' with water lilies.

And here's another view of the 'moat', this time looking from between the house and the garden studio, which sits at a slightly offset angle to it. At some times of the day, the sunlight reflecting off the water creates a lovely quality of light inside the ground-floor flat occupied by Julie's mother.

This view is of the ramp leading from the garden to what Julie and David call the 'back' door of the house, which opens into the kitchen and dining area.

Come back and visit the blog next week and we'll take you for a few more photo tours, including David and Julie's garden studio, and some of the other Home of the Year houses.