Rough Diamond Winner

With its striking concrete diagrid roof and sense of fun, our Home of the Year 2019 is a truly Auckland house.

- Simon Farrell-Green

“It’s sort of simple on purpose,” says architect Jack McKinney, self-deprecatingly of our Home of the Year 2019. McKinney designed the home in Grey Lynn, Auckland, for his long-time clients and friends, builder Cameron Ireland and Rachael Newnham, and their three children. “Sometimes a project depends on whether it’s immaculately perfect, where this lines up with that. But what we’ve learned with Cam is that his mind is an impatient one. So we had to come up with something that was a big shape, robust enough to survive a bit of editing onsite.”

By McKinney’s count, he and Ireland have built 11 alterations, three commercial buildings, four-anda-half new houses “and two billboards” over 12 years. It’s an extraordinary output that speaks to an ongoing friendship and trust that has developed, project by project, between architect and clients. The pair meets every morning at 10 to talk through the day’s issues. “That allows him some freedom, but it keeps me in the dialogue so I can say, ‘Oh you might regret that’.”

McKinney’s design is centred around an in-situ concrete roof, laid in a diagrid pattern of verticals and angles, over which he laid a glass roof in some places, and an insulated roof in others. It weighs 56 tonnes and soars from 2.2 metres up to 4.3 metres. You know it’s heavy and you know it’s made from concrete, but you can see the sky and it floods the space with light. “You somehow know that it’s 56 tonnes of weight above your head. It’s quite different to timber beams – it’s not oppressive, but there is drama to it.”