Matakana House
First-time builders Terry Bowyer and Kerry Oswald took a somewhat circuitous route to the Box™ doorstep. That said, it is a fairly common one. The Site The couple grew tired of living in draughty, uninsulated villas so made the decision to move to the country and build something modern and warm instead. “We had lived […]
Mid-Century Modern: A Home or a Museum Piece?
In this essay on the movie Brown vs Brown, Box™ founder Dan Heyworth takes an unpopular populist stance Modernism sure has pulling power. A Remuera home designed by architect Peter Mark-Brown in 1960 sold this month for $3.5 million with six bidders fighting it out for what they no doubt saw as a slice of […]
2023 TIDA Kitchens – Highly Commended Award
Box™ Design Lead, Tim Hogarth receives an award for his kitchen design renovation in Ponsonby, Auckland. Anyone who has teenagers will understand the need for a home that is bigger than 100 square metres. When the owners bought their 1920s bungalow 16 years ago, adolescent antics weren’t part of the priority list. The client brief […]
Plan of the Month – Muriwai
This long, skinny site at Muriwai had a few issues even before Cyclone Gabrielle ravaged the district. From the road, it drops off seven metres to the natural building platform. A stream runs through the middle of it (effectively bisecting it) and to the front of the 83-metre-long section, a rocky cliff faces the sea. […]
So You Think AI will Design Your House for You? (It will, sort of.)
It wouldn’t be right to ignore all the hype around AI, Chat GPT, and other AI engines and not write about them in the context of architecture. I asked Chat GPT to write it ‘in a conversational tone’, but it still didn’t sound like me, and I largely disagreed with it. So, here’s my version. […]
FOLLOW OUR BUILD (Part 1) – Mission Bay
Clients: Lara and Terence Stevens-PriorProject: 4-bedroom house, with pool, in Mission BayIn this series, we take a fly-on-the-wall look at the progressive stages of a Box™ build Tricky Sites Lead to Interesting Solutions – the Value of a Design-Build Team If there’s one thing Box™ has learned over the past 15 years in business, it’s […]
Tuhimata. Floorplan in the Spotlight Series
Box™ design manager Tony Borland-Lye shares the thinking behind this compact family home in the country. Our clients were a couple with three young kids who had always wanted to live in the country. When they came to building their first home, they invested in the peace and privacy of a lifestyle block which left […]
How Box™ makes smaller spaces feel larger
Small-home design is big news these days. A generation priced out of the real estate market has seen to that. It kicked off with the tiny house movement, morphed into a love affair with freedom courtesy the ‘van life’ brigade and even hitched up to our holidays where glamping became a glamour choice. Even if […]
At the Sharp End of Craft
No one would ever recommend starting a business based solely on principles and without a business plan, but that’s exactly what we did with Collective by Box. We wanted to build more than just a business, something that would be about creative people and artisan craft. We thought about offering a community platform that was […]
Country Road…Take me Home
Good friends are hard to find but Anna Mulvaney and Tom Fleetwood have one who is right up there in the mates’ stakes. Not only did she put them in contact with the owners of their first house in Auckland (a villa they bought through private sale) but when she knew they were looking to […]
