Mahana House Duplex 

CATEGORY
Innovation Award 
ENTRANT
Naylor Love Canterbury 
PROJECT PARTNERS
Isthmus Architects (Architect/Designer), Naylor Love Canterbury (Construction Company), PTL Structural Consultants (Engineer)

About The Build:

Craig Dixon, project director at Naylor Love Canterbury, felt incredibly proud of the team after taking out the Innovation Award at the 2023 Registered Master Builders Commercial Project Awards.

“The team worked so hard on the project and there were lots of challenges to overcome. It’s satisfying to know that all of our efforts were recognised by the wider industry. Through this project, we aimed to build good quality homes for social housing. We were motivated to go above and beyond in terms of innovation and sustainability to provide healthy, spacious, and beautiful houses for those in need,” Craig says. 
 

Judges comments:

Craig and the team had to overcome a series of design challenges. 

“The Mahana House Duplex on Glovers Road is a representation of how we should be designing and delivering sustainable, healthy homes. The issues we faced challenged the team to innovate. In particular, the skillion roof design, recessed windows and the use of PIR roof panels were seen by the team as opportunities to stretch the boundaries and think outside the box,” he says.

“Naylor Love have engaged with social housing as a way of giving back and doing the right thing in a very challenging environment. We’re proud of what is being achieved, and this brings a sense of cohesion and purpose to those who work here. It also drives the company to continue on the path of innovation around sustainability, the use of mass timber and purposeful design,” Craig says.

Judges comments:

Mahana House duplex was built for the Otautahi Community Housing Trust. It needed time and resource efficient response to the pressing acute community housing demand. The six community houses have been built to help families for a “whole of life” option at a cheaper cost, which resulted in bringing a new product to the market.

These New Zealand Green Building Council Homestar homes are better-than carbon-neutral, environmentally-friendly and maximise the available space. They were built to withstand the cold and be thermally efficient, and have been designed to be low maintenance homes for those least able to afford them.

Beautifully incorporating Maori design principles, the duplex was co-designed by Naylor Love and Shigeru Ban, the architect behind the Christchurch Transitional Cathedral, and built using large scale off-site fabrication.