For Mitchell Coll and Amy Douglas, what started as a simple shed project on Banks Peninsula has ended up the toast of award judges here and in Australia, with the latest win at the Dulux Colour Awards in Melbourne.

Mitchell and Amy, partners in life and in architecture firm Fabric, designed and built Nightlight, as the project is called, over 2½ years of holidays and weekends. The plan had been to slap it up quickly. “But I find it hard to do anything half-arsed,” says Mitchell. “The more we got into it, the more we wanted to take the time to finish it off properly.”

The result is a polycarbonate structure enveloped in timber lattice. By day it is a basecamp, packed with useful things such as a kitchen, bathroom and workshop. By night it’s a sculptural lantern bringing light to a very dark site.

Attention to detail is what caught the eye of the judges in Melbourne, just as it did when the project won the Small Project category in the 2022 Canterbury Architecture Awards then matched the win in the national awards. 

“A kernel of delight set into the landscape of Banks Peninsula in New Zealand, this modest structure demonstrates the way a subtle incorporation of colour, applied with constraint, can have a powerful effect,” Dulux judge Sarah Carney said in her comments.

“Undoubtedly, it asks a lot from one colour, which gives us more reason to commend the choice of Mist Green, as it sits so comfortably with the structural timbers and myriad greens of the surrounding bush. The result is calm and sincere, striking an organic balance between form and function.”

The win caught Amy and Mitchell by surprise. “You always go through the other finalists and think you’re just there to make up the numbers or you might get sixth,” says Mitchell. Especially when they were up against one of their favourite architects, Mel Bright of Melbourne’s Studio Bright, and her innovative Garden Tower House project.

Even better, given the small design community at home, the win put Amy on the panel of a Q&A session at a colour symposium the next day and had her mixing with other winners and judges, soaking up inspiration as she went.

Back home, next on the Nightlight site is another shed, for “dirty storage”, and setting up the site to start building the main house. No rush though.

“We have a really basic concept. Well, we have about 20 concepts but I think we’ve landed on one. But it’s going to be maybe 10 years away,” says Mitchell. “It took us 2½ years to build the shed!” chimes in Amy.

Until about a year ago, Fabric was named Coll Architecture, which operated in Christchurch for about 14 years. Smaller projects such as baches and off-grid homes have always been part of the practice, as have larger projects. Fabric currently has three large projects on the go – a new dentistry, a church and two mixed-use buildings in the central city.

Amy and Mitchell are excited by the city emerging from the rebuild. “A lot of the work is getting finished now and Christchurch is becoming itself again,” says Mitchell. “It’s getting a bit of life back, it’s getting the landmarks and wayfinding that create a sense of place that Christchurch has been missing since the quakes.”

For Amy, a sign of progress came from talking to visitors to the city during the recent Open Christchurch weekend, during which the public were invited to explore some of the new buildings and spaces. “People from other cities were saying that Christchurch really feels like it has a strong identity now. If you live here you know that, but it’s cool that visitors can find that as well.”

fabricarchitecture.co.nz