02/10/2026
First Light, 15 Years On
Fifteen years ago, a little New Zealand house travelled to the other side of the world. In September 2011, the First Light House stood in Washington D.C., surrounded by homes designed by some of the world’s leading universities. It had crossed the Pacific in pieces, packed into shipping containers and put back together by a young team of New Zealanders who had never done anything quite like it before.
The house we took with us told a distinctly New Zealand story. It was inspired by the bach, not so much as an architectural style but as a way of living: simple, efficient and deeply connected to the landscape, with spaces that brought people together and made the most of what they had. At a competition concerned with the future of energy and housing, our response was in many ways remarkably uncomplicated. Before generating more energy, use less of it. Before building more space, make better use of the space you have.
It worked. The First Light House finished third in the world and won the engineering competition, an extraordinary result for a young team from a small country on the other side of the world. But with 15 years’ distance, the competition result feels like only one measure of its success.
What strikes us now is how much of First Light was already there.
Those ideas have been tested over 15 years of practice, but they haven’t gone away. They have taken us into prefabrication and high-performance homes, into development and construction, and into community housing where the same thinking can benefit many families at once. We still love the intimacy of designing one home for one family, but we’ve always believed architecture should reach further than the relatively few people able to commission a bespoke house. Today we’re equally comfortable asking how those skills might be applied to one house or one hundred.
To learn more about this 15 year journey, read about it on our website.
