Leading Melbourne studio wins this year’s Robyn Boyd for residential architecture
Studio Bright takes out the prestigious National Architecture Awards prize with an enchanting home that changes with the seasons | SEE FULL LIST OF WINNERS
There’s more than a touch of enchantment about Hedge and Arbour House by Studio Bright. The vine-clad family home, winner of this year’s Robin Boyd Award for Residential Architecture, Houses (new) stands on a ridge of level ground raised above native parkland in Melbourne’s northern suburbs. The magic begins at the entrance where a well-established hedge, some three metres thick and about four high, screens the single-storey house and its quiet charms from a street of characterful early 20th century suburban homes.
With these two gifts – the established hedge at the front and the sprawling reserve at the rear – the architects were in a good place from the start. “It’s unusual to find that combination,” reflects Melissa Bright, principal and design director of the Melbourne-based practice, which is getting on to its 20th year. “I think of it as a secret garden.”
Sometime in the life of the now demolished 1920s family home that stood on this spacious block, a rather low arch was punched into the front hedge. Plus ça change. Visitors still enter through the arch, taking a diagonal path across a soft and informal front garden to a white façade wall of solid masonry. This wall is pierced by a large rectangular opening – rather like a proscenium arch in a theatre. Beyond it lies a more clearly defined courtyard with access to the family home and an opening to the north-sweeping sun. Visitors step down into this space, in another formal gesture of arrival. From the courtyard there are glimpses of the rear garden – visible through floor-to-ceiling glass – and the bush beyond.
“There’s definitely something magical about walking through that hedge with the garden as an entry and transition space,” says the architect. “The moment you come through the hedge, you discover layers and different landscapes all working together.
“We really liked the idea that it would be about walking through those entries and experiencing a series of gardens or courtyards – think of them as garden rooms – each one a small pocket that traps the sun and offers protection from the wind.”
Studio Bright has designed Hedge and Arbour House with an emphasis on theme and variation; no two garden spaces are the same. The rear “garden room”, to use Bright’s own term, is a rectangular pad of neatly trimmed lawn raised on a sunken ha-ha wall, and it opens to an unimpeded view of native foliage. The inviting central courtyard, in contrast, is bordered by living spaces and bedrooms. The hedged entry garden, meanwhile, is all about concealing and revealing.
All three of these green spaces, from the dramatic and the intimate to the expansive, riff on the theme of regeneration: native vegetation, wild- and birdlife.The grace note is a deciduous virginia creeper, attached to a fine galvanised mesh screen, wrapping around the house. The vine bursts into life every Melbourne spring with soft shade, blazes into a bonfire of colours come autumn, and is reduced to a tangle of bare climbing roots and tendrils in winter.
“In this house, you absolutely know what season you’re in,” reflects the architect. “You’re inside the changing seasons. That was very important for the client. The house really changes its clothes.”
As it travelled around the country, the Australian Institute of Architects’ (AIA) national jury saw a number of homes in this category boasting a strong focus on regeneration – particularly of native plant life – and the interleaving of architecture and nature. When WISH caught up with architect Jane Cassidy, chair of the 2025 jury and immediate AIA past president, she recalled her visit to Hedge and Arbour House and “the birds, the breezes, the light and the shade. This house sits in the space between city and bush in the most extraordinary way, working symbiotically with the landscape”.
The judges, she stressed, were acutely conscious of the need, in the midst of housing affordability and cost-of-living crisis, for homes that do more with less. “Some of the best design we’re seeing today addresses the question, ‘What can we not build? How can we optimise the longevity and flexibility of new housing?’. The future is not about more McMansions in our suburbs. Studio Bright has created a very hard-working home, with a simple material palette. Nothing is too expensive in itself, but the whole comes together in the most beautiful way.”
In this sense, Hedge and Arbour House is not only a house of great – though quiet and formally modest – beauty. It’s also an agenda-setting project. It points the way towards an architecture that has shifted subtly on its axis. It’s less about the architect-as-artist and more about the building and its social and family life – the way it lives and breathes. At the same time there’s no lessening of emphasis on the importance of architectural delight.
Bright is the first to admit that by tying the experience of the house so closely to the changing seasons, it can seem “a bit nude” in midwinter with its vine cladding stripped of leaves. “But in its winter outfit, it lets in the sun. Light comes pouring in. It’s quite incredible,” she says.
There is a restful modesty to Hedge and Arbour House, a rejection of extroverted architectural gestures. Nature, for the most part, does the talking. “In some ways it’s really nestled into the landscape – part suburban, part wild. It’s definitely not pushing itself out and being loud on that rear escarpment,” says Bright. “Instead, it’s a quiet part of the landscape.”
The building, with a strong emphasis on passive heating and cooling, is designed to entice the family members from their rooms. These have rather narrow windows to the south. To the north sliding doors open onto an inviting expanded corridor which in turn gives onto the central courtyard – to light and breeze. “We’re really trying to draw the kids out of the room and support moments of family interaction,” says the architect.
It’s not for nothing that the white minimalist form has a midcentury touch as Bright’s clients, in her words, “take a keen interest in architecture and love Modernism”. But they also wanted their home to be of its time, in conversation with the moment – perhaps leading the conversation. “So hopefully we’ve got the right balance of materials.” These include polished concrete floors, lots of timber lining, ceilings with expressed timber rafters. “It’s a pretty robust shell with a rich and light-filled interior.”
Bright took an indirect path towards the residential work for which she and her studio is best known. After graduating in 2001 with a degree in architecture from RMIT, she cut her teeth at big city-building firms in Europe and China before returning to Melbourne. Her residential work began modestly, with a bathroom renovation. “Then someone asked me to do a kitchen, then a living room – so on and so forth.”
The practice, founded in 2006, is strongly focused on “good homes for families that are forever homes, simple, robust, in a sense caring architecture supportive of life”. Studio Bright is also working across a span that includes social housing projects for people with special needs, and multi-residential projects.
A fine example of the latter is its 8 Loftus Street, a residential and retail block facing an urban park on one side, heritage lanes on the other, fitting snugly into the revived Quay Quarter Lanes precinct at the wow end of the Sydney CBD. The eight- storey building has a refined skin of dense steel-grey brick and bronze screens, moulded into Art Deco-inspired round corners. It looks, somehow, as if it was always meant to be there.
“We care for every apartment we design as if it were a house,” says Bright. “We use the same sensibility across different types and scales. In each project there’s an emphasis on materials – how they’re experienced and where they come from – and the creation of joyful human-scale spaces with more than a touch of beauty.”
Read the full list of National Architecture Award 2025 winners
COLORBOND® Award for Steel Architecture
COLORBOND® Award for Steel Architecture: Flinders Chase Visitors Centre | Troppo Architects | SA | People of the Ramindjeri, Ngarrindjeri, Kaurna and Barngalla nations
The Flinders Chase Visitors Centre demonstrates an exemplary synthesis of architectural resilience, material expression, and environmental sensitivity. In the wake of the Black Summer bushfires, Troppo Architects has employed steel not merely as a structural necessity but as a strategic and symbolic element of the design.
Commercial Architecture
The Harry Seidler Award for Commercial Architecture: Northern Memorial Park Depot | Searle x Waldron Architecture | VIC | Wurundjeri
Responding to an unusual brief and workforce, Searle x Waldron developed an entirely fresh approach: creating a supportive environment for staff in emotionally demanding roles, while accommodating vehicles and equipment. Created in close collaboration with the client and landscape architects, the depot is embedded within an evolving ecological system of woody meadows, wetlands and future public space – reframing the cemetery not only as a place of grief, but also of life and regeneration.
National Award for Commercial Architecture: Everlane Cremorne | Fieldwork | VIC | Wurundjeri
Contextual response and careful execution make Fieldwork’s Everlane Cremorne a standout. Positioned on a narrow street among warehouse-style offices and single-storey houses, the project balances scale with a strong neighbourhood vibe.
The building is composed of two distinct forms. A four-storey base, washed in terracotta tones and softened with planting, is cranked back from the street edge to create a sunny corner for cafe seating and greenery. A dedicated laneway guides workers and cyclists directly to the entry. The upper facades shift to silver, articulated with bespoke sun-shading.
Educational Architecture
The Daryl Jackson Award for Educational Architecture: James Cook University Engineering & Innovation Place | KIRK with i4 Architecture and Charles Wright Architects | QLD | Bindal and Wulgurukaba
The Engineering and Innovation Place at James Cook University is an exceptional piece of educational architecture. Deeply grounded in Indigenous knowledges of place, the building is considerate of the university’s original Stephenson and Birrel Master Plan but embraces its role in repositioning the campus into a contemporary learning environment.
National Award for Educational Architecture: The Shed, University of Tasmania | Wardle | TAS | The Palawa People
The Shed continues the important body of work that Wardle has produced for the University of Tasmania over the past decade.
Designed for disassembly, this sprawling learning and teaching building is structured around a deep atrium that lofts up towards an industrial articulated-timber-lined roof that punches light into the depth of the plan.
National Award for Educational Architecture: St. Joseph’s Catholic Primary School Rosebery | Neeson Murcutt Neille | NSW | Gadigal People of the Eora Nation
A good school is a fundamental part of its community. At St Joseph’s Catholic Primary School Rosebery, Neeson Murcutt Neille has produced a suite of buildings and spaces that are respectful to the heritage of the site (both built and landscape) but also chart a sophisticated catalyst for the future of a precinct. The school building embraces the magnificent existing trees on the site and cleverly utilises the topography to scale the large volumes into the surrounding suburban context.
Enduring Architecture
National Award for Enduring Architecture: Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa Cultural Centre | Gregory Burgess | NT | Anangu
In the 35 years since its commissioning, the Uluru-Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre has embodied a living partnership between architect, community and Country. Groundbreaking in its conception, it draws deeply on Anangu wisdom, collaborative design and local materials, blending innovative international construction techniques with community-based experimentation and tradition and transformation, and setting new standards for the practice of architecture in Australia.
The Uluru-Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre embeds gifted Anangu wisdom in its organic, serpentine forms, which evoke shared stories, unity and respect.
Heritage
The Lachlan Macquarie Award for Heritage: Parliament of NSW Restoration | Tonkin Zulaikha Greer and Purcell Architecture | NSW | Gadigal People of the Eora Nation
The NSW State Parliament Restoration, led by Tonkin Zulaikha Greer (TZG) in collaboration with Purcell Architecture, is a landmark achievement in heritage architecture. The project revives the historical grandeur of the Parliament while sensitively integrating the needs of a modern working legislature and enhancing the visitor experience.
National Award for Heritage: The Australian War Memorial New Entrance and Parade Ground | Studio.SC | ACT | Ngunnawal Country
The Australian War Memorial New Entrance and Parade Ground exemplifies excellence in public architecture, offering a respectful and innovative enhancement to Australia’s most revered commemorative space. The project, led by Studio SC, seamlessly integrates new facilities with the existing heritage architecture, providing a harmonious balance between memory and modernity.
Interior Architecture
The Emil Sodersten Award for Interior Architecture: Babylon House | Casey Brown Architecture | NSW | Eora / Kuring-Gai
Nine years in the making, Babylon House is an extraordinary reworking of an existing house. Nestled in bushland on the ridge between Pittwater and Avalon Beach, the original home was a quirky product of the 1950s, typical of the area.
Everywhere you look in Babylon House has something surprising to capture your attention, a stark contrast to commoditised house interiors. Every space and detail has the heart of the architect and client in it: integrated rock ledges, bathrooms set down a hatch in the floor, bespoke patterns in the floor treatments, crafted handrails, hand-finished timbers, and a stage in the lounge room.
National Award for Interior Architecture: Melbourne Place | Kennedy Nolan | VIC | Wurundjeri
Melbourne Place should come with its own soundtrack. Uber-cool, it has firmly established Melbourne as a destination for the jet-setting crowd. The interiors draw inspiration from the city’s best features: dimly lit laneways, hidden bars and a fearless use of colour.
The single-colour palette of the brick-and-steel exterior provides a backdrop to the masterful use of colour internally. Each level and room is defined by colour, art, and lighting, complemented by Australian-designed products and materials that add a uniquely local character.
National Award for Interior Architecture: New Castle | Anthony St John Parsons | NSW | Traditional Lands of the Awabakal People
New Castle by Anthony St John Parsons is an indulgent and profoundly immersive exploration of polarities. The project challenges the often-binary positions of interior and exterior; a protected, dreamlike domestic realm versus a deeply connected civic gesture, it questions how we might live separately and yet connected.
Through meticulous craftsmanship and masterful manipulation of light, material, and threshold, each space is tuned to amplify experience and delight through the lens of the garden.
International Architecture
Australian Award for International Architecture: Reuben College | fjcstudio | Oxford, United Kingdom
With architectural vision and meticulous care, FJC Studio has masterfully reimagined one of Oxford’s treasured heritage precincts. The architects have navigated the formidable challenges of hazardous materials and complex historic fabric, to deliver a transformative new residential college – Oxford’s first since 1990 – that balances reverence for the past with the needs of tomorrow’s scholars.
Public Architecture
The Sir Zelman Cowen Award for Public Architecture: Yarrila Place | BVN | NSW | Gumbaynggirr People
Architecture at its best catalyses engagement, learning and inclusion across diverse communities. Yarrila Place embodies this ethos, challenging conventional paradigms to unlock broad opportunities for connection and shared experience. The central, light-filled vertical street provides vital precinct and landscape connections, animating the interior through the expressed performative spaces while establishing a beacon of community life – a fitting response to the name “Yarrila,” a Gumbaynggirr word, chosen by the community, that translates to “place of light.”
National Award for Public Architecture: Truganina Community Centre | Jasmax (Canvas Projects) | VIC | Bunurong
The building’s lean brief is brilliantly transformed through the use of the community library as a social spine that provides a dynamic heart – engendering belonging within one of the most economically challenging, socially complex and culturally diverse emerging Melbourne communities. The design team has expertly woven intersecting programmatic elements that connect, welcome and embrace users – often members of marginalised communities – with facilities that include kindergartens, healthcare, library, community kitchens and council services.
National Award for Public Architecture: Eva and Marc Besen Centre | Kerstin Thompson Architects | VIC | Wurundjeri
The new Eva and Marc Besen Centre is yet another exceptional addition to the Tarrawarra Museum, continuing a refined and distinctive character while also referencing the campus’s rich architectural legacy.
The complex and dynamic spatial composition expertly sculpts volume, texture, space and light with a brilliant programmatic interplay of hierarchy that amplifies existing and new architectural interventions on the site. The refined outdoor and indoor circulation serves to guide but also builds anticipation and immersion through shifting layers of translucency and texture.
Residential Architecture – Houses (Alterations & Additions)
The Eleanor Cullis-Hill Award for Residential Architecture – Houses (Alterations and Additions): Niwa House | John Ellway | QLD | Turrbal & Yuggera People
Niwa House, designed by John Ellway with Hannah Waring, is a nuanced reimagining of a traditional Queenslander, subtly transformed through a spatial and philosophical lens inspired by Japanese domestic architecture. Drawing on the concept of the niwa – a small, cultivated courtyard – this project introduces a 30-square-metre addition that mediates daily life through a careful interplay of architecture, nature and climate. The central courtyard acts as a contemplative heart of the home, allowing light, air and seasonal change to permeate, while promoting spatial calm and environmental responsiveness.
National Award for Residential Architecture - Houses (Alterations and Additions): Gunn Ridge House | Kennedy Nolan | VIC | Wurundjeri
Gunn Ridge House is a distinguished and deeply respectful reimagining of an architecturally significant Merchant Builders residence originally designed by Graeme Gunn for John Ridge. Honouring the legacy of a practice that pioneered a modern Australian vernacular, the project retains the original design’s courtyard planning, material restraint, passive solar principles and integration with landscape, conserving the contributions of original collaborators Janne Faulkner and Ellis Stones.
Through carefully measured interventions, the architects have expanded and clarified the dwelling, responding to the evolving needs of a new family while preserving spatial complexity and historical resonance.
National Award for Residential Architecture - Houses (Alterations and Additions): The Stopover | Taylor Buchtmann Architecture | SA | Ngarrindjeri
The Stopover by Taylor Buchtmann Architecture is an exemplary adaptive reuse project that transforms a disused grain store on a remote South Australian sheep station into a refined and resilient rural home. Through the insertion of two timber-lined living “capsules” and minimal intervention to the existing stone envelope, the project preserves material heritage while creating a thermally protected, contemplative interior suited to the region’s harsh climatic conditions. Reclaimed and local materials – timber, stone, brass and hand-seeded river stones – reinforce a philosophy of environmental care and embodied energy reduction.
Residential Architecture - Houses (New)
The Robin Boyd Award for Residential Architecture - Houses (New): Hedge and Arbour House | Studio Bright | VIC | Wurundjeri
One of the most exciting themes in this year’s awards is the way architects and clients are exploring new approaches to living. Hedge and Arbour House by Studio Bright is a standout example. Guided by the client’s wish to foster a closer connection to nature, the house is designed to be almost entirely enveloped by the landscape.
National Award for Residential Architecture - Houses (New): Mapleton House | Atelier Chen Hung | QLD | Gubbi Gubbi People and Jinibara People
Mapleton House by Atelier Chen Hung is a restrained and poetic response to site, climate, and the minimalist values of its occupants.
Two zinc-clad pavilions are embedded into the ridgeline, forming an “inhabited terrain” that balances privacy and openness while maintaining public sightlines to Mount Ninderry and Mount Coolum. A pared-back material palette of zinc, native timber, and sandstone aligns with the occupants’ ethos of simplicity and durability.
National Award for Residential Architecture - Houses (New): New Castle | ANTHONY ST JOHN PARSONS | NSW | Traditional lands of the Awabakal People
New Castle by Anthony St John Parsons is a profound meditation on domesticity, enclosure and the enduring allure of the garden. Conceived as a contemporary garden of delight – evoking echoes of the Garden of Eden – the residence is entirely contained within a thick limestone perimeter wall that conceals a lush, cultivated interior world.
National Award for Residential Architecture - Houses (New): Lagoon House | Peter Stutchbury Architecture | NSW | Garigal People
Modest from the street, Lagoon House unfolds internally as a masterful sequence of layered spaces moderated with light and air. The client sought a home that would endure, prompting Peter Stutchbury Architecture to embrace a new direction – one heavily grounded in place and material longevity. Off-form concrete walls anchor the house, complemented by a restrained palette of precisely detailed timber, copper and brass finishes.
Residential Architecture - Multiple Housing
The Frederick Romberg Award for Residential Architecture - Multiple Housing: Blok Three Sisters | Blok Modular in collaboration with Vokes & Peters | QLD | Quandamooka People of the Yuggera Nation
As the name suggests, the project is accommodation for three sisters and their extended families in the form of three coastal “townhouses” that replace a single-family beach shack on the site that had been enjoyed by the sisters since childhood. This project is about nostalgia manifest in an architecture that facilitates intergenerational living, and the importance of passing on knowledge of place, community, ways of living at the beach and how to be on holiday.
National Award for Residential Architecture - Multiple Housing: Shiel Street, North Melbourne, Community Housing Project | Clare Cousins Architects | VIC | Wurundjeri
Shiel Street is a community housing project of 78 apartments across eight floors in the inner suburb of North Melbourne. Clare Cousins Architects has delivered an outstanding piece of community infrastructure whilst working under highly pressured time constraints to facilitate government funding. The project, developed by housing provider Housing Choices Australia, sits in a precinct featuring historic social housing schemes, and makes a valuable contribution to this lineage.
National Award for Residential Architecture - Multiple Housing: Indi Sydney | Bates Smart | NSW | Gadigal
Indi Sydney is a benchmark project in the emerging build-to-rent market in Australia. This nascent typology has been relatively slow in its investment trajectory and has rarely engaged high-calibre architects in its delivery until now. At Indi Sydney, Bates Smart has brought decades of experience in multi-residential work to execute a sophisticated and highly sustainable outcome on a tight city site with all the added complexity of a Sydney Metro over-station development.
Small Project Architecture
National Award for Small Project Architecture: Geelong Laneways: Malop Arcade | NMBW Architecture Studio with ASPECT Studios | VIC | Wadawurrung
As the first realised component of a broader laneway network in central Geelong, the project transforms a two-storey shop into a green pedestrian passage, forging vital links between cultural institutions, university precincts and the waterfront.
Brick and timber fragments become tactile expressions of past use; steel bracing, necessary for structural integrity, has been integrated as spatial gesture.
National Award for Small Project Architecture: Denman Village Park Amenities | Carter Williamson Architects | ACT | Ngunnawal/Ngambri Peoples
The Denman Village Park Amenities project exemplifies the capacity of small-scale architecture to achieve outsized civic and emotional impact through thoughtful, joyful design. Within a modest footprint and utilitarian brief, Carter Williamson Architects has created a spirited public pavilion that delights in its playfulness and cares deeply for its users.
Sustainable Architecture
The David Oppenheim Award for Sustainable Architecture: First Building - Bradfield City Centre | Hassell | NSW | Darug People of Dharug Country
Designed by Hassell in collaboration with First Nations cultural design and research practice Djinjama, the project represents a paradigm shift in integrating Country-centred knowledge systems with modern architectural processes.
Environmental performance is embedded at every scale. The building integrates rainwater harvesting, natural ventilation, solar energy generation, low-carbon concrete, rammed-earth walls and a biodiverse green roof.
National Award for Sustainable Architecture: METRONET Morley-Ellenbrook Line Project | Woods Bagot with TRCB, TCL and UDLA | WA | The Traditional Lands of the Whadjuk People of the Noongar Nation
The Metronet Morley–Ellenbrook Line Project represents a benchmark in sustainable, inclusive transit-oriented development. Designed by Woods Bagot with TRCB, TCL and UDLA, the project employs a modular, prefabricated construction methodology that reduces embodied carbon, limits construction waste and enhances long-term adaptability. Station precincts are shaped by passive environmental strategies, maximising natural daylight, ventilation, thermal massing and solar orientation to minimise operational energy demand.
Urban Design
The Walter Burley Griffin Award for Urban Design: Sydney Metro City Stations | Sydney Metro | NSW | Gameragal & Gadigal Clan Groups
The Sydney Metro City Stations project is a strategic, financial and urban design triumph. Tackling a wickedly complex, multifaceted challenge, this Metro project has had a dramatic effect on mobility through Sydney’s inner corridor.
This is a collaboration of intricate detail that has delivered outstanding results from an engineering perspective, but the stations are also exceptional in that each has its own urban character and spatial/material quality.
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