Best Fashion Designer
Wellington designer Alexandra Owen makes her mark.
Fashion designer Alexandra Owen is not one to do things by halves. This year alone, the talented Wellington designer has opened her first stand-alone store, gotten married, shown one Winter collection for her third season at New Zealand Fashion Week, and designed a second, different Winter collection for the prestigious New York Fashion Week, where she has been invited to show early next year. Does she find time to sleep? “Yep!” she declares, with customary good cheer, before amending herself, “Not much – there is the odd sleepless night....
Best Design Store
This design store is friendy, quirky and fun.
As the name implies, there is a lot of love in this Hawke’s Bay store. Bright, spacious, and curated with a careful eye, Aroha Lamour has a love for design that is carried through every part of this small business. The welcoming and approachable feel of the store permeates through the entire space. The small family-run shop reminds one of provincial mom-and-pop stores that use to line the main streets of small towns.
This is no typical small town store, however. Aroha Lamour stocks the country’s top labels in...
Circus Performer
A new house in Orakei, Auckland by Hillery Priest architects impresses the crowds with a few well-honed tricks.
A morning at the circus. How decadent and surreal, particularly on a sunny weekday morning. This is not, however, the old school circus of sawdust, tents and carni-folk, instead this is the town-planned version. Fenton Circus, a wide circle of grass ringed with a loping road and suburban houses, was created in the 1930s as a focal point of the planned State Housing development of Orakei, the ‘people’s’ housing poised above what, even then, was...
Iron Giant
RTA Studio celebrate their 10th birthday with the completion of Ironbank, their most complex and adventurous building to date.
The Auckland skyline of recent times is not generally a thing of cheer, and visiting any new addition to it is something to be approached with trepidation. In a design climate where the buildings often just fill the planning guidelines, the more promising the site, the greater the opportunity for disappointment. Ironbank occupies the old Deka site which, on the Karangahape ridge, is the perfect opportunity to screw things up. It is a...