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Toi MAHARA, the Kāpiti Coast District Gallery, is celebrating success in the form of awards presented to the new Gallery’s architects and builders by their industry organisations.

Athfield Architects, designers of Toi MAHARA, were honoured for their work when they received one of three awards in the Public Architecture section of the 2024 Wellington Architecture Awards.

Building contractors Crowe Construction earned a Gold award in the Tourism and Leisure section at the Master Builders’ Commercial Project Awards.

Mahara Gallery Trust Board Chairperson Gordon Shroff described the awards as extremely satisfying.

“We set out to create a distinctive, professional-standard gallery to store and display our taonga artworks,” he said. “These awards confirm that as well as achieving those goals, we’ve delivered a building with the highest quality of design and workmanship.”

Kāpiti Coast District Mayor Janet Holborow congratulated the architects and construction firm for their success and described them as the “icing on the cake” for such as important facility in our district.

“A large part of the success of the project is down to the professionalism of everyone involved,” she said. “Our award-winning district gallery is testament to the positive relationships between suppliers and internal teams who worked really well together towards our common goal,” said Mayor Holborow.

Judges of the Wellington Architecture Awards noted the design gives the building a new identity and acknowledges its geographic and cultural location. They commended the design’s inclusion of a series of flexible spaces within a compact footprint.

The upgraded Toi MAHARA provides a permanent home for the nationally significant Field Collection which includes 24 paintings by Frances Hodgkins. The new gallery has double the number of exhibition galleries and has almost three times the exhibition space as its predecessor.