Highfield Architecture

At Highfield Architecture, we believe a home should be more than just visually striking - it should work beautifully too. Based in Mount Maunganui and working across New Zealand, we bring over a decade of experience to projects ranging from residential renovations to high-performance multi-residential. Our approach balances performance, comfort, and aesthetics, resulting in spaces that support everyday living, beautifully and comfortably.

Having worked both in New Zealand and France, we bring international experience to local projects and a commitment to creating homes that outperform the minimum standards. Too often, houses look impressive but are expensive to run and uncomfortable to live in. We see the New Zealand Building Code as a baseline — not a benchmark — and design beyond it to deliver healthier, more efficient, and more comfortable homes.

We work closely with clients, consultants, and builders from the very beginning, ensuring the whole team is aligned from concept through to completion. Whether it’s a family wanting a healthier home, a developer seeking well-performing design, or a homeowner aiming to get more out of their renovation, our focus remains the same: delivering architecture that is thoughtful, enduring, and uplifting to live in.

One of our standout projects to date is a series of townhouses in Westmere, Auckland, designed with Formance SIPs as the core building system. The goal was to create four contemporary homes on a tight urban site that not only looked striking but also performed exceptionally well in terms of comfort and energy efficiency.

Using SIPs enabled us to achieve a highly insulated building envelope with excellent air-tightness, reducing energy demands and creating healthy, quiet interiors. For the clients, this meant a long-term investment in homes that are future-ready - low in running costs, high in comfort, and built to a higher standard than typical townhouse developments.

This project demonstrates that high-performance design doesn’t need to be limited to bespoke standalone houses; it can just as successfully be applied to medium-density housing, delivering benefits for both developers and future occupants.