Ngārara Villas wins highly commended at the ADNZ Wellington awards
A home designed for ageing should still feel like a home. Ngārara Villas shows what that looks like.
We’re proud to share that Ngārara Villas has won a Highly Commended award in the Multi-Unit Housing category at this year’s ADNZ Wellington Region Design Awards.
We designed Ngārara Villas as a 20-home development on the Kāpiti Coast, bringing together one, two, and three-bedroom villas across a mix of single and two-storey layouts. Sixteen of those are single-storey homes, and we built them around ageing-in-place from day one: open, easy floor plans and wet-floor bathrooms throughout, so aging in your own home never has to mean giving up good design.
Here’s what the judging panel had to say:
Ngārara Villas exemplifies dignified ageing-in-place design. Sixteen single-storey homes feature open, legible floor plans enabling unrestricted movement and long-term adaptability, with wet-floor accessible bathrooms throughout. Sheltered courtyards, retained mature trees, and car parking tucked discreetly away create a safe, pedestrian-focused environment offering residents well-considered protection without compromising independence or design quality.
We were determined to keep the mature trees already on site rather than clear them, and they now anchor a shared communal space to the north. We tucked car parking out of sight to keep the development feeling like a place for people first, not cars. Every material choice, cedar cladding and soffits, schist, and metal roofing in tones pulled straight from the coastline around it, was chosen to root the development in its landscape rather than sit apart from it. We gave every villa its own water tank to ease the load on the mains supply, and every bike shed comes with power built in for charging an e-bike.
If you’re thinking about a multi-unit project of your own and want to see what a design like this could look like on your site, we’d love to talk it through.
