Four new additions that widened New Zealand Design Week 2026
Every edition we try something we have not tried before, and 2026 added four. We gave the week themed days, a trade day and a home tour among them, and slotted in new formats that reached audiences the conference and Design Days did not. Four stood out: a Dulux networking dinner, a trade day at Residium, an architect’s home tour, and a Lexus lunch built around International Women’s Day.
The Dulux Pay It Forward dinner
Held on Tuesday 3 March, Pay It Forward was an invitation-only dinner hosted by Dulux, built on a simple idea: put 20 established industry leaders and 20 emerging designers in one room and make them talk. The evening ran as structured speed networking, several short rounds, before opening into a roaming dinner catered by Bossi. Across architecture, interiors and spatial design, it turned mentorship into a format rather than an afterthought, and gave the pay it forward idea a table to happen at.
Trade Day at Residium
Thursday 5 March was framed as the week’s trade day, and Residium hosted its trade-focused strand at its design and building centre on The Strand in Parnell. The programme leaned into export, with a session on the framework for taking New Zealand design to the world, drawing on New Zealand Trade & Enterprise. It was a different register from the public-facing days: a working session for the businesses behind the products, on how local design competes offshore.
The architect’s home tour
On Friday 6 March, our architect’s home tour took small groups through a set of private homes, most of them the architects’ own. It was the festival at its most intimate: not a stage or a showroom, but the inside of houses people actually live in, read for their design. The format traded on access, the chance to stand in a well-made home and hear the architect talk through the decisions behind it, and it suited a day given over to how design meets domestic life.
The Lexus lunch, on International Women’s Day
On Sunday 8 March, coinciding with International Women’s Day, Lexus presented a lunch and panel at Daphne’s in Ponsonby, titled Women Reimagining the Future: Design, Vision, and Leadership. Facilitated by Alice Lines of Homestyle, the panel brought together Karen Walker, a Lexus ambassador, alongside Megan Wyper of Acme CupCo, Annabel Smart of Studio 11:11, Phoebe Devine of Previously Unavailable and Lucy Vincent of Sans[ceuticals]. Set against the Mediterranean backdrop of Daphne’s, it married a good lunch to a genuine conversation about women shaping design, vision and leadership.
What the additions signalled
Taken together, the four new formats show a festival filling in its edges. A dinner for mentorship, a trade day for export, an architect’s home tour for the design-curious and a lunch that put women at the centre of the leadership conversation. None of them competed with the conference or the Design Days; each reached sideways, into a room those days could not hold. It is how we think a maturing festival grows, by building more kinds of table rather than only bigger stages.
