Rust Architects is a small Auckland studio working on residential new builds, villa renovations, and interior architecture for families who want to build well and build once.

The studio is led by Rachael Rust, a Registered Architect with over ten years of experience across New Zealand, London, and Amsterdam. Time at UNStudio, Fearon Hay, and Cheshire Architects working across high-end residential and mixed-use commercial projects at an international scale brought a particular fluency with complex briefs, considered materiality, and the kind of detail resolution that tends to get value-engineered out of less carefully run projects. That experience now applies to a much more personal scale - the family home, the villa that's been waiting twenty years for the right intervention.

A lot of the work happens at the intersection of architecture and interior - how materials sit alongside each other, how a room is detailed, how a home starts to feel specific to the people who live in it rather than generic to the period it was built in. That's where the difference tends to show.

Projects typically involve new homes, the renovation of pre-1940s Auckland villas and bungalows, or interior styling as a standalone service. The studio works with a small number of clients at a time, which means the thinking stays close to the work.

For thinking on residential architecture, renovation, and the decisions that shape a home

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