Coll Architecture

Since its founding in 2009, Coll Architecture has been coming up with innovative and unique approaches to Canterbury’s housing shortage. Their tight-knit teamwork intimately to create functional, beautiful and timeless architectural homes and buildings for their clients.

Their service “combines artisan proficiency, polished design diligence and old-fashioned approachability.” They believe that their youth brings flare to the practice, and enables them to provide equal amounts of youthful inspiration and realism to their designs. With a passion for staying ahead of the eightball in their design approach, Director Mitchell Coll’s vision for the company was to “evolve alongside the dramatically changing landscape in Christchurch.”

With the topic of compact housing as relevant as ever, Coll Architecture’s champion of space-efficient buildings was showcased in this clever Christchurch design. Sharp angles against the sky, tiny square windows, rusted steel and rivets: from the street, Mitchell Coll and Amy Douglas’ two-bedroom house looks impenetrable, like a tank that’s been left in the rain. Coll never thought he’d get to build one of his own creations, let alone live in it. Instead, he ended up building two. He could have designed one house for the site, but as someone who spends a lot of energy promoting high-density, space-efficient buildings, it wouldn’t have felt right. “I really only needed 150 to 200 square metres of land for the house we wanted,” he says, “but the site was 300 – so I just did what was best for the site really.”