Bathe Wins a Southern Architecture Award

Bathe has been awarded a 2026 Southern Architecture Award by Te Kāhui Whaihanga New Zealand Institute of Architects, in the Small Project Architecture category.

It's a generous thing, to be seen. Especially for a space designed to be felt more than noticed.

The site was always going to be the challenge - constrained, irregular, right in the middle of town. What Hyndman Taylor Architects made of it is a sequence of spaces that unfold slowly: curved weathering steel, dense planting, each pool turned inward and open to the sky. You move through it and something shifts. Privacy without enclosure. A sense of journey, then retreat.

The award citation speaks to mauri and kaitiakitanga - the way the architecture softens into its setting rather than asserting over it. That was the intent from the start. A space rooted in place, made to give something back.

None of it stands up without the hands that built it. Our thanks to the trades and makers who brought the design off the page:

• Tiny Pools

• Dent Construction

• Lakeside Stainless

• OPR

• Evolution Plumbing

• Shane Mitchell Earthworks

Good design is a lot of people doing careful, often unseen work. We're grateful to everyone who did theirs.

Article here - https://www.nzia.co.nz/awards/local-architecture-awards/aluume-spa/12892/

Come and experience it for yourself.