The jury and the public have had their say — feast your eyes on the winners of Architizer's 14th Annual A+Awards. Subscribe to our Awards Newsletter to receive future program updates.
For most of the last century, wood in the home stayed in the background. It was the floor you walked on, nothing more. That’s changing.
In a lot of new houses, wood has moved from a finish to a foundation, from the thing you notice last to the thing that shapes how a room gives you a feeling. Architects aren’t using wood to only decorate anymore. They’re using it to build the feeling of the space itself.
Wood holds time in it. It shows the hand that worked it. In rooms that can feel flat and interchangeable, it brings back a sense of weight and a human scale.
Part of what makes it so attractive right now is that it lives in 2 worlds. Wood is one of the oldest things we’ve ever built with. At the same time, it bends to our newest tools, milled, layered, and curved into shapes that weren’t possible a generation ago. Architects are using both ends of that range at once.
These 5 winner of the A+ Awards houses below sit across four continents. Each one gives the lead role to wood, and each one ends up somewhere different.
Dune House
By Waechter Architecture, Northern Coast, Oregon
Jury Winner, Private House (S 1000 – 2000 sq ft), 14th Annual A+Awards
On the northern Oregon coast, Dune House sets a weathered cedar shell against a very calm interior. The outside is left to the weather, greying and softening the way coastal cedar always does, so the house seems to settle into the dunes instead of sitting on top of them. Inside, the material list shrinks almost to one thing: oak on the floor, oak on the walls, matched so closely that the two read as a single wrapping surface.
The restraint is the whole point. Waechter strips out almost everything that would normally break up a surface, hiding the trim until the joints nearly vanish. What’s left feels calm and carved, as if the rooms were hollowed out of one solid block of wood. The oak runs through the living areas and gathers around a central courtyard with a skylight, where daylight drops in from above and slides across the grain.
Northcote House
By LLDS, Melbourne, Australia
Jury Winner, Private House (XS <1000 sq ft), 14th Annual A+Awards
Northcote House takes a familiar terrace-house layout and quietly blows up the inside. Using modern fabrication tools, LLDS swaps the usual string of small rooms for one big hall, topped by a free-form timber roof that curves and folds overhead like a landscape, tucked under a roof garden.
That ceiling rises and dips above the kitchen and dining area, and where it lifts, thirteen rooflights pull daylight far deeper into the house than a terrace home usually gets. The result is warm and a little dramatic: a soft, hand-finished wood canopy floating above rough, pleated concrete walls. The two materials balance each other; the concrete keeps the room grounded, and the wood keeps it from feeling cold.
Riverdale House
By Studio Lau, Toronto, Canada
Popular Choice Winner, Residential Renovations & Additions, 14th Annual A+Awards
Riverdale House does more with the same footprint. Studio Lau took a narrow Edwardian house in Toronto and opened it into a bright, modern family home without moving a single wall. The house stays exactly as big as it was, but somehow feels twice the size. The trick is light, and the tool is wood. In a plan this tight and deep, daylight is the rarest material, so custom timber millwork does the heavy lifting.
AMS House
By Jacobsen Studio, Porto Feliz, Brazil
Jury Winner, Residential, Residential Interiors (>3000 sq ft), 14th Annual A+Awards
AMS House breaks itself apart to blend into its setting. Instead of one solid block, Jacobsen Studio splits the plan so the building threads through the landscape instead of blocking it. At the center is a tall social space carried by a wide grid of exposed laminated wood beams, pale, natural, running the full length of the room. That grid sets up a steady rhythm, beam after beam, leading your eye out through big sheets of glass to the forest beyond, so the house almost hands you the view. Under the floating wood ceiling sit rammed earth walls: ancient, layered, the color of the ground itself. Where the wood meets the earth, skylights are cut into the seam, throwing shifting bands of shadow down the wall through the day.
Flat Ourânia
By Studio MK27, São Paulo, Brazil
Popular Choice Winner, Residential Interiors (>3000 sq ft), 14th Annual A+Awards
Studio MK27 treats this São Paulo home as a retreat, a place you sink into rather than look out from. Downstairs, a single field of Portuguese mosaic stone runs from the garden straight into the main living spaces, so the floor never marks where outside ends and inside begins; you just drift across without noticing. Against that cool stone, the architects wrap almost everything else in Freijo, a warm Brazilian hardwood that climbs the walls, crosses the ceiling, and forms the built-in shelves, until the whole living area sits inside one deep, earthy tone. Upstairs, the same paneling continues into the family room, which sits at the center of the home like a hinge, linking the master suite on one side to the kids’ wing on the other.
The jury and the public have had their say — feast your eyes on the winners of Architizer's 14th Annual A+Awards. Subscribe to our Awards Newsletter to receive future program updates.
