An award-winning new house in Auckland, New Zealand, Home Sweet Home is a Grey Lynn residence built as a sequence of discoveries, with sunken lounges, tucked-away snugs and quiet corners that reveal themselves one by one. It’s a sanctuary made for slowing down, where thoughtful architecture, playful colour and carefully considered interiors come together to create a home with warmth, character and personality.
Nestled in one of Auckland’s most beloved city-fringe suburbs, this house sits quietly at the end of a leafy cul-de-sac. Unlike the standard rectangular sections nearby, the site is triangular, with a steep slope at the rear. As a result, the unusual geometry called for a creative response, turning the constraints of the site into opportunities for the architecture.
Black corrugated metal cladding wraps the exterior, giving the home a bold, textural presence against its leafy surroundings. At street level, a parking area marks the arrival, while the ground then steps gracefully down towards the front door.
Inside, meanwhile, thoughtful planning makes the most of every inch. Rather than treating the compact and unusual site as a limitation, the design uses changes in level, tucked-away spaces and carefully framed views to create a home that feels generous, layered and full of discovery.
Rogan Nash is proud to have achieved a Homestar 6 rating from the New Zealand Green Building Council for both Design and Built, demonstrating that beauty and sustainability can live comfortably side by side. Importantly, achieving a Homestar rating is no small feat. An independent assessor evaluates the home in depth against criteria spanning energy efficiency, warmth, health and resource use, with every credit supported by evidence and audited by a third party.
For Home Sweet Home, we considered sustainable performance from the earliest design decisions through to construction. As a result, environmental performance is woven into the architecture rather than added as an afterthought. Ultimately, the rigour sits quietly behind the home’s warmth, colour and character. Here, a beautifully considered house and a genuinely sustainable one are part of the same design story.
Colour-blocking becomes a playful way to distinguish the home’s inner worlds. From the moment you step inside, graphic olive and white Mutina tiles mark the arrival, establishing the playful material palette. Elsewhere, the kitchen glows in slate green, while a dusky blue sideboard settles into the dining room. The living space rests in sandy beige, creating a softer backdrop for everyday life. Meanwhile, pale dreamy pinks signal the hardworking spaces, including the laundry and scullery. Upstairs, bold patterned wallpapers bring joy and energy to each of the three bedrooms. Together, these colours give every room its own identity while maintaining a cohesive sense of warmth throughout the home.
The kitchen sits at the true heart of the home, overlooking both the dining area and the garden beyond. Naturally, it is where the household gathers, connected visually to everything happening around it.
More than simply a workspace, the kitchen becomes a vantage point across the main living spaces. From here, the house unfolds in several directions, reinforcing the sense of connection between cooking, dining, living and the garden.
Elsewhere, quietly separated from the main living spaces, the snug offers a different kind of pleasure, doubling as a media room. Dressed in deep maroon, it draws you in like a good story. In contrast to the brighter rooms elsewhere, the darker palette gives the room an intimate, cocooning quality, creating somewhere to retreat at the end of the day. Together, the home’s palette creates a sense of sweet nostalgia. The colours are intentionally a little mismatched, yet deeply harmonious: warm, familiar and wonderfully homely.
This colour-led approach to interior architecture has been widely recognised. In particular, the kitchen won the Kitchen category at the 2024 Interior Awards, while the project was named Interior of the Year by HOME magazine.
In addition, the project has been featured in HOME and Homestyle, and was a finalist in both the Residential Interior Architecture and Colour Award Spatial categories at the 2023 Best Awards.
