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A country home that resembles a tin shed has won one of Australia’s top architecture awards.

The Spring Creek Road Farmhouse, which is located in Bannockburn, just outside Geelong, received the national award for new residential architecture houses at the National Architecture Awards on Tuesday night.

One of the winners of this year’s National Architecture Awards, Spring Creek Road Farmhouse, looks like a tin shed from a distance.

“It’s kind of actually the best of that really Australian shed building vernacular,” jury chair Shannon Battisson said.

“It is this incredible quiet shed-like structure from the outside, which if you’re driving along, you would be really easily forgiven for not even really noticing it as a house.

“And yet as you enter the house, and it’s soft and relaxing, there’s an incredible sense of light, and it’s really quite elegant.”

The Spring Creek Road Farmhouse by architect Brew Koch was one of several Victorian winners at the awards which recognise Australia’s best architecture.

The judging panel visited every finalist covering 18,000 kilometres via 14 flights and eight people movers.

Spring Creek Road Farmhouse won the residential award at the National Architecture Awards.Credit: The Australian Institute of Architects

Other Victorian designs that were awarded included the Melbourne Holocaust Museum in Elsternwick, AB House in Barwon Heads, JCB Studio in Richmond and the Delatite Cellar Door.

Lucy Clemenger architects designed the Delatite Cellar Door for Delatite Winery in Victoria’s high country and won the commercial architecture award.

“This building really feels grounded, and like it kind of grew instead of being placed,” Battisson said. “The material palette is incredibly refined and yet earthy and natural.”

She said Clemenger’s design included a focus on one generation moving on to the next generation for the cellar door.

Spring Creek Farmhouse was praised for its “incredible sense of light”.Credit: The Australian Institute of Architects

“The building showed really great respect for the history of the cellar door as well as being really brave and expressing this incredible new chapter that’s going to happen for them.”

Clemenger said she was pleased to see architecture in regional areas so strongly represented in this year’s National Architecture Awards.

The Delatite Cellar Door by Lucy Clemenger architects.

“It feels like it’s been a little while since we’ve really seen that fantastic investment in the built environment in our regions, and it was just so wonderful to see such a huge push forward of that in this year’s awards,” she said.

National Architecture Awards winner in the commercial category, Delatite Cellar Door.

Nightingale Village in Brunswick, which is made up of six buildings and 203 homes, won the residential architecture multiple housing category and the award for sustainable architecture.

“Despite their holistic similarities, all the buildings in the village are as different as you’d expect from a group of normally competing architects who are suddenly on the same side,” the judges said.

“We will need a variety of typologies to solve our housing crisis and while Nightingale provides one, it lays the groundwork for many more.”

The Victorian Family Violence Memorial by architects Muir and Openwork won the award for small project architecture.

Battisson said the memorial in East Melbourne was “the most moving experience of the built environment”.

“You can take what at first glance is a busy kind of street corner, but when you walk through the spaces that they’ve created, there’s this incredible quiet and calm and real respect to, I think, the kind of people who will go there and visit that memorial,” she said.

The University of Melbourne Student Precinct won the national award for heritage and the award for urban design for six new and refurbished buildings at the university.

“It really showed how incredibly well we can work with multiple layers of heritage while still creating bold, strong new spaces,” Battisson said.

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