About Houses

Houses

Houses is Australia's leading magazine of residential architecture, published bi-monthly by Architecture Media from Melbourne. Launched in 1989, it documents the country's best architect-designed houses — new builds, renovations and extensions — through photography, plans and critical commentary, serving both the architecture profession and the design-conscious public. It is the residential companion to Architecture Australia, the journal of the Australian Institute of Architects, and the organiser of the annual Houses Awards.

Overview

The magazine's subject is the Australian house as an architectural achievement. Each issue presents a selection of residential projects from across the country — coastal retreats, inner-city terraces, rural homesteads, apartments and multi-residential developments — documented with professional photography, floor plans and project credits, and accompanied by writing that explains the design thinking behind them. Its readership spans practising architects, architecture students, builders and developers, and the growing public audience for design culture.

Houses is published in English, in print and digital editions, six times a year. Its publisher, Architecture Media, also produces Architecture Australia and Landscape Architecture Australia, the ArchitectureAu digital platform, and the industry's major awards and events. Since 1 July 2024 Architecture Media has been solely owned by the Australian Institute of Architects, which acquired the remaining 50 per cent stake from co-founder Ian Close; the company remains a standalone business with editorial independence under chief executive Jacinta Reedy.

History

Houses was first published in 1989 by Architecture Media — then a young specialist publisher building its portfolio around the architecture profession. The launch recognised a gap in the Australian market: the shelter magazines covered interiors and lifestyle, and the institute journal covered the full range of architectural practice, but no title was devoted to residential architecture as a design discipline. Houses filled it, treating the house with the same critical seriousness the profession afforded to public buildings.

The timing was fortuitous. The 1990s and 2000s saw Australian residential architecture enter a golden age: a generation of architects — working in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and the regional centres — produced houses of international quality, and a growing affluent public developed an appetite for architect-designed homes. Houses documented the boom house by house, becoming the record of an era in which the Australian house became a cultural statement.

The magazine's institutional position strengthened over time. It counts the Royal Australian Institute of Architects (now the Australian Institute of Architects) as a co-author or contributor and is endorsed by the Design Institute of Australia — affiliations that embed it in the profession's structures while it addresses a public readership. Its editor has included Alexa Kempton, and its pages have carried the work of the country's leading architectural photographers and writers.

The Houses Awards

The magazine hosts the annual Houses Awards, launched in 2020, which recognise the best residential architecture in Australia across categories covering new houses, renovations, extensions, apartments and outdoor spaces. Described in industry coverage as a prestigious accolade and a celebration of Australian design ingenuity, the awards have quickly established themselves as a significant marker of excellence in the residential sector — complementing the Australian Institute of Architects' own awards programme with a dedicated residential focus.

The awards' judging, published in the magazine and on the ArchitectureAu platform, showcases the year's outstanding houses to both professional and public audiences, and winning projects gain national visibility. For architects specialising in residential work — a large proportion of the Australian profession — the Houses Awards are among the most relevant forms of peer recognition available.

Editorial character

Houses treats its subject with architectural rigour. Project features include plans and sections alongside photography, allowing readers to understand how houses work — how rooms relate, how light is managed, how buildings sit in their landscapes — rather than merely how they look. The writing explains design decisions in accessible language, bridging the profession and the public: an architect reader finds technical and conceptual substance, while a prospective home-builder finds ideas and inspiration.

The magazine's project selection reflects the diversity of Australian residential architecture: the Queensland veranda house reimagined for subtropical living, the Melbourne terrace extended with a sculptural rear addition, the coastal house oriented to views and weather, the rural retreat built for fire resilience, the inner-city apartment carved from a warehouse. Across these types, the magazine's consistent themes are climate-responsive design, the relationship between house and landscape, material honesty and the craft of construction.

The publisher and the ArchitectureAu ecosystem

Houses sits within Architecture Media's integrated publishing operation: Architecture Australia (the institute journal, publishing since 1904), Landscape Architecture Australia, the ArchitectureAu website (covering the built environment daily since 2011), and the Design Speaks events programme. The company's awards stable — the Houses Awards, the Australian Interior Design Awards, the Eat Drink Design Awards, the AA Prize for Unbuilt Work and the ArchitectureAu Award for Social Impact — makes it the central convenor of the Australian design community's calendar.

The 2024 acquisition of Architecture Media by the Australian Institute of Architects secured this ecosystem under professional ownership ahead of the Institute's 2029 centenary. For Houses, the change formalised what was already true in practice: the magazine as part of the profession's media infrastructure, serving architects while speaking to the public.

The golden age of the Australian house

The magazine's first three decades coincided with an extraordinary period in Australian residential design. The 1990s saw the rise of a distinctly Australian modernism — houses of corrugated iron, spotted gum and glass, raised on stilts or carved into hillsides, designed for indoor-outdoor living in a demanding climate. The 2000s brought the inner-city terrace renovation boom, as architects transformed narrow Victorian workers' cottages with dramatic rear extensions of concrete, steel and glass. The 2010s added the coastal weekender as an architectural type in its own right, and the 2020s have foregrounded sustainability, fire resilience and multi-generational living.

Houses documented all of it — not as a passive observer but as an active participant in the culture. By selecting, photographing and critiquing the best work, the magazine helped define what "best" meant: it rewarded climate-responsive design before sustainability was fashionable, celebrated modest budgets well spent alongside lavish commissions, and gave regional practices a national platform. Architects who built their reputations substantially through the magazine's pages form a roll-call of contemporary Australian practice.

Public engagement

The magazine's public role extends beyond its pages. Alongside entities including the City of Launceston and the Tasmanian Government, Houses supported the Open House Launceston programme in 2021 — part of the global Open House movement, founded in London, that opens architecturally significant buildings to the public across forty cities worldwide. The association reflects the magazine's philosophy: that good residential architecture is a public good, and that the public should be invited to experience it firsthand.

The Houses Awards serve a similar function, translating professional judgement into public celebration. The awards' published results — the jury citations, the photography, the stories behind the projects — reach an audience far beyond the profession, shaping public taste and, indirectly, the briefs that clients bring to architects.

The residential architecture media landscape

Houses occupies a distinct position between the institute journal and the shelter magazines. Architecture Australia covers houses among all building types, for a professional audience; the homes and lifestyle titles — Belle, Inside Out, Home Beautiful, Country Style — cover houses as lifestyle, for a mass audience. Houses alone treats residential architecture as a discipline for both audiences: rigorous enough for architects, accessible enough for the design-interested public.

In a country where the house remains the dominant building type and the object of intense cultural attention — the renovation shows, the property pages, the endless public conversation about housing — a magazine devoted to the architect-designed house has a natural constituency. For more than three decades, Houses has been its chronicler: the bi-monthly record of what Australia's architects have built to live in.