130 | Planit Construction Five-level home takes top honours Winners circle: the team from Wellington-based construction company Planit Construction, BUILDING T T Rosa Watson A 650sqm expansive Wellington home overlooking the city’s harbour was the National Supreme Winner at the 2024 House of the Year Awards. Built by Wellington-based construction company Planit Construction, the house is a highly engineered, rigid steel frame structure, clad in black glazed terracotta tiles, with five levels and featuring a stunning three-level spiral staircase and lift. Planit Construction owner Rowan Hannah says the scale and complexity of the build was “absolutely next level”. The project was six years in the making, from the beginning conversations with the architects and homeowners to completing the last few landscaping items. Up to nine staff were on site at any given time during construction, along with up to 20 sub-trades. The first stage was to demolish an old house on the site, followed by almost a year of extensive earthworks and foundations, including 64 drilled RCP piles up to 750mm diameter and up to 14m deep. The in situ concrete work and structural steel were all on a huge scale. The final stage was completing a comprehensive cladding system followed by detailed finishings. Two stand-out features were the enormous steel spiral staircase, which had to be fabricated in situ, and the maintenance-free glazed terracotta tile cladding, Rowan says. Construction took place over the Covid 19 pandemic, which Rowan says caused a few challenges. The cladding was sourced from overseas with an eight-month lead-time, which required good forward planning. “Achieving an exceptional quality and finish on a project of this scale and complexity is phenomenally difficult to achieve, so to have the judges say ‘this is as close to perfection as we have seen’ was certainly something the team is incredibly proud of.” Rowan says the recognition from the awards was worth more than any marketing campaign, and it also brought the team a huge amount of satisfaction. “The House of the Year competition has meant we have continually lifted our standard over the past 17 years,” he says. The firm has made the national awards every year it has entered, with this being its fifth national award. In 2017, it won the National Supreme Renovation of the Year for a property in Mt Victoria, Wellington. “To win at nationals is extremely difficult. The standard of entries gets higher each year and we are competing against the best of the best the country is producing, so any national award is extremely coveted. “I don’t think you can ever be confident, but we did know we had delivered an extreme- '*3&1-"$& 40-65*0/4 '03 &7&3: 41"$& WELLINGTONFIREPLACE CO NZ PICKERING ST KAIWHARAWHARA
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