Construction-industry consultant Mark Kirby called for a systemic change to boost productivity. “In practice, the choke point is often before the first nail is driven,” says Dan Heyworth, who heads design-and-building company Box. He is an advocate for pattern books which came about “because builders need shared rules that translate design intent into buildable forms.”
Dan Heyworth — don’t force the mass market to behave like a bespoke project
The evidence Kirby marshals is sobering — from BRANZ reports to GDP analysis — implying nearly 10 percent of sector value is lost to systemic quality failure, says Heyworth.
“These numbers demand coordination and public leadership, not incremental tinkering.
Quality control, in the managerial sense, is an incomplete diagnosis of what makes New Zealand housing slow, expensive and incoherent.
The act of building has been crowded out by repeated bespoke design, consenting interpretation, procurement complexity and then layers of monitoring to manage risk created upstream.
This is the paradox of a heavily customised, performance-based system. Each novel design is a one-off prototype, requiring an equally bespoke paper trail to prove compliance, reinforced by heavy-handed council risk management.”
Tick the box
Kirby states that when, in 1988, the Building Code moved toward performance-based outcomes, the system drifted toward a “tick-box culture” and a widening gap between “work as imagined” and “work as done” on site.
That observation is valuable, but there’s a different remedy: reduce the amount of “imagined work” required for each individual house by reducing unnecessary variance.
If every project starts from scratch, the system will keep buying risk-management twice — once in design/consent and again through inspection and remedial work.
Shared standards
Government should understand that pattern books are a practical form of leadership. They set a shared standard people can use, not just a compliance regime they must endure.
Quality management is necessary, but insufficient because it tries to discipline a system whose baseline input remains bespoke, high-variance, and administratively heavy. Pattern books change the baseline.
Productivity reform
A regional housing pattern book is not nostalgia nor a style diktat. At its best, it’s a standardised pathway that bundles together:
- a set of well-resolved, climate-appropriate dwelling patterns (types, layouts, envelope details)
- pre-endorsed compliance logic (what is already deemed to satisfy key requirements)
- constrained options for adaptation (materials, façade variation, internal configuration)
- a planning interface that recognises repeatability.
Quality into inputs
This does something quality-management systems struggle with, baking quality into the inputs (repeatable design + repeatable details), rather than trying to inspect quality into a one-off prototype after the fact.
Crucially, pattern books don’t abolish bespoke architecture. They create a “fast lane” for the majority market — builders who want to build, not continually re-litigate design and compliance — while leaving the slower pathway for those who choose it.
Asher Benjamin’s American Builder’s Companion disseminated architectural knowledge to ordinary builders through manuals intended for local carpenters, shaping the coherence of whole regions. Paris’s Haussman and Edinburgh’s Georgian New Town are timeless examples of patterns still being built today.
The Kiwi precedent
New Zealand has its own precedent. The state house programme produced a recognisable typology and materially raised standards from the mid-1930s and 1940s.
Archives NZ still catalogues “state house plans” with plan numbers and repeatable layouts across suburbs — an administrative memory of standardisation at scale.
Architectural coherence is not an accident. It is an outcome of shared patterns, tempered by local adaptation, repeated often enough to become legible as place.
Proof-of-concept
The most relevant contemporary example is just across the ditch. New South Wales (NSW) has explicitly positioned its Housing Pattern Book as a mechanism to accelerate high-quality low- and mid-rise housing. Architect-designed patterns, adaptable to site conditions, are endorsed and tied to fast-tracked assessment.
NSW describes a pathway in which pre-endorsement “removes the need for assessment against matters already addressed in the pattern designs”.
That is the administrative unlock that transfers effort from repeated case-by-case scrutiny into a shared, maintained library of proven solutions.
Early signals of uptake are good. Reporting in late 2025 described strong demand including claims of tens of thousands of purchases.
Measurable feedback
Pattern books work because repeatability creates measurable feedback. Defects and delays can be traced to details and procurement problems that recur, which are then fixed once and propagated everywhere.
Repeatability does something else New Zealand urgently needs. That is creating enough demand certainty to justify local manufacturing of components.
Even partial movement in that direction (windows/doors, wall systems, wet-area pods, standardised junction details, known fasteners and membranes) can shift value from one-off procurement toward stable local supply chains.
ROI “legacy” projects
Return on investment is not hypothetical. If New Zealand is losing around $2.5 billion annually to defective building and productivity drag, even a modest dent in rework and pre-construction churn is significant.
Unlike subsidies, a pattern-book investment compounds. Designs improve over time, compliance pathways harden, suppliers tool up and builders learn.”
What a NZ regional pattern-book could look like
- Regional pattern libraries (from Northland to Southland) with climate-responsive envelopes, local vernacular cues and landscape guidance — so coherence emerges without monoculture.
- A consenting fast lane where plan and detail compliance is pre-verified and councils assess only site-specific matters (setbacks, services, hazards), not re-proving the dwelling itself.
- Open-but-governed licensing: low-cost access to CAD/spec packages, but with version control and mandatory updates as building science evolves.
- Self-certification: with the Government’s move to proportional liability and 70m2 granny-flat legislation, patterns are the next step.
- Tangible opportunities for off-site / modular: standardisation at scale could finally help the off-site industry prove its business model and give it confidence to tool-up.
- A commissioning body that stewards the pattern libraries as well as quality systems.
- A parallel pathway: preserve design freedom for custom homes, just don’t force the mass market to behave like a bespoke project.
