Trustpower's new Durham St headquarters received two awards in the 2016 Waikato/Bay of Plenty Architecture Awards.

The winners were announced overnight at an awards ceremony at the University of Waikato.

Trustpower Head Office interior by Warren and Mahoney. Photo: Supplied

The new Trustpower building, which officially opened in Tauranga on March 2, won a commercial architecture award for the base build architects Wingate + Farquhar and an interior award for Warren and Mahoney.

Judges said the new four-storey office building eloquently refines the urban fabric of Tauranga.

'On both mainstreet and alleyway elevations, the beautifully handled façade of glass gives a simple elegance to the building's context.

'With a playful rhythm, colour and light are brought deep into the floor plate by a series of clerestories on each side of the central atrium.

'The line between base build and fit out is successfully blurred through a seamless collaboration with the fit out design team. Design decisions are deliberate and meticulous at every scale of the project.”

Trustpower is New Zealand's fifth largest electricity generator and retailer, having broken the NZ energy mould by expanding into multi-product offerings including telephone, internet, and gas.

In more than two years, rapid expansion has seen Trustpower outgrow its former head office facility at Te Maunga.

That, combined with a desire to move to a new activity based working model, which Trustpower calls Synergy New Ways of Working, has seen 525 staff move to the new purpose-built facility.

The 2016 Waikato/Bay of Plenty Architecture Awards, which set the standard for good architecture in the region, were won by 23 projects across six categories.

New houses, traditionally a very strong category in the Waikato and Bay of Plenty, won the most awards.

Ten houses, many of which are clustered around popular holiday destinations or rural locales in the Coromandel Peninsula and Lake Taupo, were acknowledged for their high quality design.

There was also a very strong showing by buildings in the commercial architecture category, which suggests a confidence in the region for important infrastructural or manufacturing facilities.

Geoff Lentz, the convenor of this year's awards jury, said many of the 'wildly imaginative” award-winning residential projects resulted from 'inspired collaborations with clients.”

'Successful architecture is the product of excellent working relationships,” he said.

'If there was an overall theme to this year's winning works, it is that each project – whether house, tertiary education facility or reinvented inner-city office – shows the type of outcome that can be achived by client with vision and a highly skilled architect.

"The clients and architects that worked on these projects were highly motivated to produce something that would not just meet basic requirements, but would lift the surrounding environments as well.”

The results of such collaborations include strong or colourful forms that sit obviously in the landscape. The ‘pioneer red' house in the Puketui Valley, near Tairua, designed by RTA Studio, expresses the client's interest in tramping and brightly coloured DoC huts.

On the other side of the Coromadel Ranges, the K Valley House, designed by Herbst Architects, is built from a number of recycled elements, such as corrugated iron and timber. Both draw some measure of inspiration from the shapes and forms of rural buildings.

The judges were also impressed with the level of investment and high standard of commercial work in the region's powerhouse cities: Hamilton and Tauranga.

In Tauranga, the new head office for Trustpower received two awards: a commercial architecture award for the base build architects Wingate + Farquhar; and an interior award for Warren and Mahoney.

Wingate + Farquhar received a second award for a 'skilfully scaled” office, showroom and warehouse for the New Zealand-owned company Sims Distribution Tauriko, and a third for Te Wānanga o Aotearoa, Tauranga, a purpose-designed Maori educational facility.

In Hamilton, a 'new landmark for the city” is how the judges described a R&D lab and manufacturing factory for window and door manufacturer APL.

Designed by Jasmax, the building has façade that is 100m long and 9m high. It has been described as a 'living mural” that changes the appearance of the building depending on the direction of the approach.

In winning two commercial awards, for Ebbett Audi and Volkswagen showrooms and an office building for insurance company FMG, Chow:Hill Architects was acknowledged for its ability to make uplifting contributions to the surrounding environment.

Fresh insights into ways to recycle existing buildings and building materials was also on display at this year's awards.

The imaginative rehabilitation of office for Louise Feather's Planning and Talking Tech, both designed by Hamilton's Edwards White Architects, are both encouraging precedents for the re-use of Hamilton CBD buildings. Both received awards for interior architecture.

Of the many wonderful projects that won awards this year, Lentz describes Eat Streat, the public space project that has revitalised the heart of Rotorua, as a highlight.

'This rare – but very important – example of urban intervention saw a streetscape pedestrianised and transformed into a vibrant restaurant and social environment.

"A project such as this shows the capacity of architects, working with visionary clients, to remedy, repair and inject new life into our cities and towns.”