Stunning Highgate Hill renovation nabs Queensland Architecture Award

Think back to your primary school days in Queensland. Do you recall spending lunch hours baking under blazing hot sun?

Of course you don’t. You were probably safely in the shade of your wooden school building, eating your Vegemite sandwiches on the bench and playing handball among the concrete pillars.

It’s in tribute to this aspect of Queensland schools that architect Paul Hotston and his team from Phorm Architecture and Design came up with the St Marcellin Centre, a new building for grades 5 and 6 at the Marist College in Ashgrove.

The building has just won two Queensland Architecture Awards 2025: the Queensland People’s Choice Prize, plus an Award for Educational Architecture.

“It’s important to create the classroom for these students, but the other important thing is to create a space where they can retreat during lunchtime,” Hotston said.

“It’s a quiet nod to the low understorey spaces of state school buildings.”

“Just by lifting something off the ground in that way, they’ve unlocked so much amenity for the school,” said Queensland Architecture Awards Jury co-chair Jonathan Goh.

The awards recognise new homes, renovations, public buildings and commercial buildings across the state.

Kangaroo Point Bridge received three awards, including the top honour, the Queensland Architecture Medallion.

“The bridge creates connections between where people live and where people work in a quite beautiful way, by having these moments of experience as you cross the bridge,” Goh said.

A hospital restoring dignity to its patients

Another local project winning multiple awards is the Caboolture Hospital Clinical Services Building.

The $353 million addition to the hospital took out the FDG Stanley Award for Public Architecture as well as the Social Impact Prize and a commendation for Interior Architecture.

“Hospitals are often labyrinths, it can be a really frustrating experience,” Goh says.

“This hospital addresses that. There are generous, welcoming areas, and you don’t feel lost.

“The architects have worked hard to provide moments of comfort and dignity for people who are in the hospital.”

Jacobs Australia’s Megan Reading said the courtyard was central to the design.

“We oriented the buildings so they looked forwards to the north, because people don’t want to look at roofs. It’s about maximising light, and getting the views across the township of Caboolture.”

Reading came to architecture after being a registered nurse, which she says gives her “real empathy” for the work hospital staff have to perform delivering the care that the community expects.

“It gives me a great thrill to be able to deliver them a really functioning, high-quality environment to work in,” she said.

A less-is-more renovation

Designed by John Ellway, Niwa House in Highgate Hill earned the Elina Mottram Award for Residential Architecture in the Houses (Alterations and Additions) category.

The original Queenslander sat 2.5 metres above the backyard and had no real connection to the outdoors. Ellway added a ground-level kitchen-dining room to the rear joined to the building by an interior garden.

“There are houses that look out. This house creates a world inside,” Goh says.

Rather than gobbling up garden space the extension only adds 30 square metres to the original building.

“Adding a whole heap of area to a house doesn’t make it more liveable if the original bits aren’t configured well,” Ellway says.

‘Niwa’ is Japanese for garden or yard, and the renovation reflects the architect’s Japanese influences and the owners’ fondness for the country.

“Traditional Japanese houses, like our own, are timber, so there are many clues about how to control light and combine with gardens,” Ellway says.

The relevance of architectural awards

Other winners within the Brisbane area include two awards for the Sun Stadium, a public artwork at the University of Queensland in St Lucia.

The Beatrice Hutton Award for Commercial Architecture was won by the redevelopment of the former Piccadilly Arcade in Queen Street.

The National Rugby Training Centre in Herston won an Award for Public Architecture and an Award for Interior Architecture.

St Aidan’s Anglican Girls School Sports Performance Centre in Corinda won awards for Educational Architecture and Steel Architecture.

Gold Creek, a house in bushland in Brookfield co-designed by Steendijk with legendary Australian architect Glenn Murcutt, got an Award for Residential Architecture.

Blok Three Sisters, a trio of joined modular beach houses on North Stradbroke Island built for three siblings, won the Award for Residential Architecture – Multiple Housing.

Goh praised the latter as an example of architects using their skills to address the housing shortage.

“Those kinds of solutions are doubling the density, but at the same time, making them liveable and beautiful places to be in,” he said.

Goh said the awards were important for reminding people why architecture matters.

“There’s a famous quote by Winston Churchill who said, ‘we shape our buildings, and then they shape us’,” he said.