Highbrook Crossing redevelopment is a significant public realm upgrade to the original plaza space at Goodman NZ’s major asset base. Ongoing tenant growth revealed the unsuitability of the space, with high wind velocities preventing the plaza from being used to its potential. Our key design moves, informed by advanced Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), disrupt and calm winds, improving comfort and creating a more attractive and useable outdoor amenity area.

With limited rain cover available in the plaza, the proposal addresses this with a significant continuous canopy over the most desirable areas of the plaza and its key approaches. Crucially, the canopy is glazed, to maximise sun and daylight, with a frit pattern to moderate direct sunlight, reduce maintenance, and add texture to the surfaces below as the sun moves across the sky.

To leverage an improved outdoor area, much of the perimeter building facades are replaced to increase transparency and views into hospitality outlets and better locate tenancy entrances to maximise visibility and capture pedestrian desire lines across the plaza and between buildings.

New seating areas, sheltered from the elements while naturally lit from above, provide a range of flexible seating options outside tenancies, supplemented by outdoor tables and chairs set out by individual outlets. This project is currently under construction.

Client: Goodman New Zealand

Metrics: 1,100m² of upgraded public space, 630m2 new glazed canopy cover

Renders: One to One Hundred, JWA

The second in a ‘family’ of veiled office/warehouse developments on Landing Drive, this project distinguishes itself from its neighbours with an evolution of the vertically slatted facade strategy developed for our previous project at 17 Landing Drive.

Curved sculptural screens animate these office structures, inspired by the eroded edges of the Oruarangi Creek and the flight paths of the migratory birds that visit it. The design language was refined with solar and thermal modelling analysis, providing efficient and targeted mitigation of heat loads while maximising open area, daylight, and views. These screens wrap the offices’ rectangular footprints and create focal points that contrast the scale of the warehouse, and incorporate vertical louvres for western sun protection and weather shelter to the staff terrace to the north of the office.

The screen further leverages its corner position with these curves in both elevation and in plan, a highly modelled and human-scaled counterpoint to the massive scale of the warehouse, and Landing Drive’s curving crescent sweeping over the landscape.

JWA worked closely with D&H Steel to create the office façade. Continual interaction during the design and shop drawing process helped refine and simplify the curved steel arches while factoring in fabrication constraints, wastage, and site erection and buildability requirements.

In addition to its sustainability certification, typology-specific initiatives included post-tensioned floor slabs to reduce the tonnage of reinforcing mesh, optimised steel member sizes (rather than off-the-shelf sections frequently larger than required across long spans) to warehouse portal frames to reduce tonnage, and the distinctive vertical shading design that mitigates overheating and glare, reduces cooling loads, and creates the office’s strong visual identity. Onsite stormwater treatment means the project places no demand on the public system. The project has achieved a 5 Greenstar design rating and awaits its built certification.

Client: Auckland International Airport Ltd

Metrics: 770m² offices, 15,980m² warehouse

Awards: 2024 Property Council Industrial Property Award – Merit

Photography: Simon Devitt, Hamish Melville, Jono Parker

Lauchlan House is a family home atop a dramatic cliff overlooking Browns Bay on Auckland’s North Shore. Responding to its steep terrain and coastal context, tiered volumes descend down the site, following the natural contours to create a collection of related spaces that flow effortlessly between indoor and out.

To the street, the home presents a modest single-level façade with a curved verandah that belies the slowly sweeping bay the house overlooks. This intentionally understated exterior presents a subdued and subtle introduction from the street, but on entering and moving through the home, a more complex sequence of spatial experiences unfold and reveal themselves, culminating in the expansive views that connect it to its surroundings.

With one side of the house nestled against the hillside, such sites often face challenges with overheating and poor ventilation. The design response incorporated clerestory windows on each level, allowing natural airflow and passive ventilation throughout the home’s different levels and spaces. The swimming pool is located at the site’s lowest point below the house. This ensures that the pool remains cool and inviting even throughout the summer months.

Client: Confidential

Metrics: 410m² home

Photography: Sam Harnett

Tāwharau Lane occupies one of the last industrial sites at the South Auckland Highbrook Business Park, and as a prominent site, the client ‘s brief was to recognise this closing of a chapter with an architectural statement. The second key driver was to achieve a sector-leading Green Star 6 rating, a new chapter in the client’s development story.

The planning response arranges the buildings to optimise warehouse sizes, yard orientation and for the offices to be visible from Highbrook Drive, the main thoroughfare into the estate. To provide a strong street address and identity in an open landscape the offices are designed with distinct architectural gestures.

The orthogonal floor plates are wrapped in a curvaceous screen; like a Korowai (Māori Cloak) this screen protects, and is an acknowledgement of achievement. The protection is predominantly from solar gain, and the achievement is the project’s strong commitment to environmental stewardship, and a celebration of constructing almost 500,000m2 of space over the last twenty years. The curvilinear lines and shape echoes the wrapping of a cloak around the body, expressed with contrasting lighter and darker colours. The treatment of the warehouses is recessive, and echoes the same curved lines of the screens.

Client: Goodman New Zealand

Metrics: 1,000m2 offices, 7,100m2 warehouse. 6 Greenstar Design & Built Rating

Photography: Jono Parker

Awards: 2024 NZIA Auckland Architecture Awards Winner – Commercial Architecture. 2024 Property Council Industrial Property Award – Excellence. 2024 Property Council Sustainable Building Property Award – Excellence

The client brief was for an industrial development on a large irregularly shaped plot on Tidal Road in Māngere; one building for a wine, beer and spirit merchant, and a speculative design on the balance land. The plan went through various iterations to derive an efficient masterplan that optimised warehouses sizes and provided north-facing yards protected from the prevailing south-westerly winds, and cleverly used the irregularly shaped parts of the site for yard and carparking.

The anchor tenant accounts for 70% of the site’s use, and JWA drew on their culture and history to inform the design. As distributors, they build and grow brands in the New Zealand market, with a strong focus on community, belonging and participating in the hospitality industry. This is demonstrated with a communal cafeteria for all staff, on site initiatives including fruit and vegetable gardens, beehives, and chickens for eggs.

To celebrate hospitality and the welcoming of guests that is at the core, the office frontage is a full length entry portico with a feature barrel vaulted roof, inspired by traditional barrel-vaulted wine cellars and the curved timber lined inside of oak barrels. These vaults extend back into the first bay of the building. The  cantilever of the roof greatly reduces solar gain to the office.

Customer-facing meeting areas are placed along the front of the building, designed as casual meeting spaces visible as you approach the building. The ground floor includes the cafeteria, and open plan office area. Upstairs is a smaller floor plate with a conference room and training bar.

The warehouse is purpose-built with insulated panel to create a stable temperature for safe storage of alcohol. The smaller building echoes the other with a large cantilever facing north, and a similar material palette. The building uses rainwater harvesting and solar panels on the roof of the warehouse to achieve the required sustainability targets.

Client: Triumph Capital

Metrics: 1,800m2 offices, 11,635m2 warehouses

Photography: Simon Devitt

Awards: 2022 Property Council Industrial Property Award – Excellence. 2024 NZIA Local Awards – Finalist, Commercial Architecture

This project started with a very modest brick and tile cottage set amongst villas of a leafy Devonport suburb, and a client with a distinguished engineering career designing large commercial structures who wished to build with steel and concrete.

From here emerged a multilayered project resulting in a specific response to site, context and the people involved. From the outset the client went against the expectations by wishing to retain the original cottage, in part as a reminder of the brick and tile house they grew up in. As a Heritage Zone, Auckland Council were very supportive, as many of this era and style of house in this area are lost.

The residence is designed to act as a comfortable dwelling for a retired couple that can easily accommodate large numbers of visiting family. It is conceived as a sequence of indoor and outdoor spaces that take you from the public facing front formal lawn, directly into the renovated cottage and through a glazed link to an informal intimate courtyard surrounded by living spaces and bedrooms, a private space that supports family life.

The addition’s spaces are intentionally well defined and small scaled in keeping with the scale of the original cottage. The use of commercial construction results in unexpected elements to the rear addition such as welded steel columns, Corten balconies and cantilevered concrete stairs.

This tension between the old and new folds together the history of both the client and the site. Multiple histories of site and context are reflected in the two roofs, the peaked form of the original cottage and the roof form of the addition, inspired by the Devonport Naval Base saw tooth buildings that are visible from the harbour, and a nod also the client’s history with industrial buildings.

This project has a 6 Homestar rating with NZGBC, re-using bricks from the renovation of the state-house, incorporating rainwater tanks, and utilizing operable windows to control temperature and ventilation.

Client: Confidential

Metrics: 220sqm home

Awards: 2024 NZIA Auckland Architecture Awards – Finalist Additions & Alterations

Emerging from the verdant landscape of ‘The Landing’ business park, Hellmann’s new office and warehouse facility makes a bold architectural statement. Twin mono-pitched roof planes soar out from the backdrop of a 213m long, 75m free span warehouse, brought back to ground by finely cast triangulated precast pylon walls.

These feathered pylons act as outstretched wings to draw visitors into the office with impressive cathedral ceilings to the entry lobby, lunchroom and open plan office spaces.

The architecture is a series of gestures invoking the theme of flight, appropriate to the operations of a logistics company and the Hellmann logo of flying geese.

An earthy colour palette of greys, browns and whites nestles the building within the surrounding landscape. Materials were chosen for their longevity, texture and where possible, minimising environmental impact. The facility has achieved a four Greenstar accreditation.

Client: Auckland International Airport Ltd

Metrics: 400m2 offices, 16,000m2 warehouse. 4 Greenstar Design & Built Rating

Photography: Simon Devitt

Awards: 2022 Property Council Industrial Property Award – Excellence

One of the last development parcels in this Highbrook business park, this project occupies a gateway site on the corner of Highbrook and El Kobar Drives
The brief sought a strong architectural statement suitable to the high-profile tenants targetted for the site.

The three separate office and warehouse frontages form a sculptural interface between the wide drive it faces, the structured and rhythmic landscape of Highbrook and the views out the Tamaki River estuary.

Perforated feature screens playfully shelter the terraces below, and integrated with the roof forms create the street address and identity of the development.

Client: Goodman New Zealand

Metrics: 1,090m2 offices, 4,240m2 warehouse

Photography: Simon Devitt

Building 6 followed the construction of Building 5 along Highbrook Drive, and was a challenge to plan to make the best of the outstanding views to the natural landscape, articulate the building along Highbrook Drive and relate to the urban context of Highbrook to its south elevation.

The resulting form has projecting bays out to the north creating suspended space to each tenancy with views north and west to the estuary. Three of these to each level works well to provide this special room to each tenancy when broken into three tenancies, or multiple spaces when a single tenancy.

The 3 towers are twisted towards the north west, reflecting the weather-shaped landscape of Highbrook and following the curve of Highbrook Drive.

Client: Goodman New Zealand

Metrics: 4,305m2 offices

Photography: Simon Devitt

The prominent location at the intersection of Landing Drive and Te Kapua Drive called for a specific design to respond to the extensive existing landscaping and the overall Business Park.

An array of steel fins form a sculptural screen which stands out against the building as a spark of yellow. The colour and movement of the screen are inspired by the surrounding tussock grasses, and gestures deliberately towards the intersection.

The effect is dynamic and vibrant as befits a commercial building, and changes shape and density as you move around it.

The southern office is single storey and directly faces the future runway. The same fins articulate this façade, responding to the landscape while acting to screen the interior and the outdoor terrace, and to frame the entry.

The building plans are designed with efficiency, flexibility, access to daylight and to maintain views out. The warehouse with a moveable inter-tenancy wall provides a long term flexible leasable space.

Metrics: 1,000sqm offices, 10,000sqm warehouse. 5 Greenstar Design Rating

Awards: 2020 Property Council Industrial Property Award – Merit. 2020 NZIA Auckland Architecture Awards Winner – Commercial Architecture. 2020 Resene Colour Award

Photography: Simon Devitt