86 | Warren & Mahoney Architects ARCHITECTURE Kakahu Waihi Tasman Piha Cambridge Proud to support Warren & Mahoney Architects 189 Main South Road, Sockburn, Christchurch 8042 Phone: +64 341 5036 | Email: info@clay-bricks.co.nz | www.clay-bricks.co.nz Bespoke Kitchens & Interior Joinery Proudly Supporting Warren &Mahoney Architects At Evolution Interiors we create customkitchens, bathrooms, wardrobes, laundries and bespoke joinery designed to bring together functionality, craftsmanshipand timeless style. www.evolutioninteriors.co.nz 027 226 4323 | Karl@EvoInteriors.co.nz Overcoming challenges The defining feature of Frankie’s House is a monolithic brick form, built from a custom brick manufactured locally using South Island clays. T T Karen Phelps Warren & Mahoney has been recognised at the 2026 Te Kāhui Whaihanga New Zealand Institute of Architects Canterbury Awards for two very different residential projects, both demonstrating the practice’s ability to deliver award winning outcomes from challenging sites and complex briefs. The first project, known as Frankie’s House, transforms an awkward trapezoidal site in central Christchurch into what the awards jury called a confident and cohesive family home. Its defining feature is a monolithic brick form, built from a custom brick manufactured locally using South Island clays, that presents a restrained, almost fortress-like face to the street before opening dramatically to the north-west. Warren and Mahoney principal Tobin Smith says the geometry of the site was the starting point for everything that followed. “The block wasn’t square, so we had no interest in pretending it was,” says Tobin. “A forty-degree crank in the floor plan lets the house turn toward the sun rather than fight the boundary lines and that single move set up the whole project.” Inside a dark-toned entry foyer compresses the arrival sequence before giving way to a light-filled living space that forms the social heart of the home. A perpendicular stair, lit from above by a skylight, separates public and private zones and upstairs the two children’s bedrooms are deliberately identical. “We didn’t want any sense of hierarchy between siblings, so the rooms mirror one another exactly,” says Tobin. The second award-winning home is a sensitive reworking of a 1920s villa whose street presence the practice was determined to preserve even as it overhauled the interior. Structural damage from the Canterbury earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 forced substantial intervention but rather than treat the repair as a purely technical exercise the client used it as a chance to rethink how the house functioned. “The original plan was a series of boxes — a narrow dining room cut off from the kitchen, verandas that had been infilled and turned into storage. None of it worked for how people actually live now.” The project unfolded in two stages, first, strengthening and reorganising the existing villa around a new kitchen that acts as a hinge between old and new then adding a freestanding Garden Room to the west, lowered to meet the terrace outside and topped with a pyramidal ceiling that funnels light through a central oculus. The jury praised the pavilion for taking cues from the original house’s white palette and pitched roof while simplifying the detailing into something unmistakably contemporary. “We wanted heritage and new work sitting comfortably side by side, not competing with each other,” says Tobin. Both projects were credited as a collective effort within the practice, with Jonathan Coote, head of design and principal in Christchurch, working alongside Tobin on each scheme. Taken together, Tobin says the two award wins underline a consistent thread in Warren and Mahoney’s residential work. “It shows our willingness to let a project’s constraints, whether an unconventional boundary line or a century-old structure, shape the architecture rather than override it.”
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