Home of the Year 2013 - the finalists

The Home of the Year judges have completed their deliberations, and the finalists in our 18th annual Home of the Year award have been selected. We're delighted to present them for you here (with thanks to our Home of the Year partner, Altherm Window Systems). 

The six homes in this post will all appear in full in our Home of the Year issue, which will be on newsstands on April 4 - in which we'll also reveal which house has scooped the $15,000 first prize. 

Huge thanks to our rigorous judges, Lance Herbst of Auckland's Herbst Architects and Cathleen McGuigan, the New York-based editor in chief of Architectural Record magazine, who accompanied HOME editor Jeremy Hansen on visits to all the shortlisted houses last week. 

Here are the finalists, in no particular order. 

This highly crafted home (below) by three-time Home of the Year winners Stevens Lawson Architects is on Waiheke Island, with carefully framed views of the Hauraki Gulf and Onetangi Beach. Photo by Mark Smith.

In Auckland, architect Jane Priest of Lochore Priest Architects deployed a warm modernist vocabulary in designing her own family home (below) to accommodate herself, her husband and their two daughters. Photo by Jackie Meiring. 
 

In Christchurch, Duval O'Neill of Herriot + Melhuish designed a sensitive renovation of an early 1960s home by Ernest Kalnins (below) with incredible views of the ocean and the Southern Alps. Photo by Russell Kleyn.

The four architectural graduates from Patchwork Architecture designed and then spent a year building this charming, low-budget home near Whanganui (below). Photo by Paul McCredie.
 

Auckland's Glamuzina Paterson Architects devised a smart response to a huge landscape in creating this courtyard house near Wanaka (below). Photo by Patrick Reynolds. 
 

Last but certainly not least, Wellington's Tennent Brown Architects designed this house (below) near Nelson (with assistance from landscape architect Megan Wraight of Wraight & Associates, who helped devise the sensitive terracing scheme for the home's pavilions). Photo by Paul McCredie. 
 

We're delighted at how varied the lineup of finalists is, not only in their geographic locations, but in their budgets and the approaches their architects have taken, too. We can't wait to show you more of them in our Home of the Year issue. Our thanks to all the architects and homeowners who entered the competition and agreed to let the jury see their homes. We feel very privileged to be able to share these great works of architecture with you.