A family home inspired by The Simpsons episode where a naked Homer and Marge visit the Garden of Eden and the project to build underground stations for Sydney’s $21.6 billion new metro line have won top honours at this year’s state architecture awards.

Announced on Friday night, the state’s highest award, the NSW Architecture Medallion, and the Lloyd Rees Award for Urban Design, went to the Sydney Metro City Stations project that opened last year and linked Chatswood to Sydenham with six new stations and upgrades to two others.

The winners of the 2025 NSW architecture awards range from the modest to the monumental and the delightfully weird, as well as those with ambitions such as the metro and the new city of Bradfield that are changing the city.

The judges said expressions such as “legacy project” and “city shaping” were often empty rhetoric. But not with Sydney Metro.

Delivered by dozens of architectural practices including Woods Bagot, Cox Architecture, Foster + Partners, Grimshaw, Hassell, John McAslan + Partners, and Architectus, with designers, artists, engineers, landscapers and others, the metro was ambitious and truly transformative.

It had “redefined civic experience” in Sydney. “As a nation, with a few notable exceptions, we are often guilty of being under-ambitious when it comes to our built environment. It’s a welcome shift. This is infrastructure that supports not just movement, but social and cultural connection as a catalyst for future development and change. It demonstrates the far-reaching impact architects can have on shaping public life and delivering tangible benefit to society and the environment.”

The metro was one of 72 projects out of 284 entries that received awards and commendations after 37 jurors visited 137 sites across the state.

Anthony St John Parsons won the Wilkinson award for residential architecture for New Castle, a new home at Merewether in Newcastle that was built around a massive walled garden.

The judges said it was “a rare work of architectural bravura that drew on centuries of architectural knowledge, from the monumental grandeur of Roman villas to the artistry of Mughal gardens, that thoughtfully reinterpreted these lessons in a contemporary way”.

A sole practitioner who also teaches architecture, St John Parsons is now building his own home, bringing a little bit of paradise to the inner west with an extension that clusters around a garden courtyard.

He said New Castle had been a “career-making project” that began during COVID. It took four years, during which his two sons, Miro and Mathias, were born.

The beachside suburb of Merewether was Newcastle’s version of Bondi, and most homes left little space for a garden. When the owners of New Castle said they liked his idea of a large interior walled garden, he looked for examples of idyllic gardens in literature, art and popular culture, from the Elysian ideal to a Bosch painting about earthly delights, and his love of The Simpsons.

St John Parsons became interested architecture as a boy growing up in Woy Woy when a neighbour gave him models of little homes as toys.

Asked before the awards how we would feel if he won, the 38-year-old replied: “It would feel like I’ve peaked. I’m happy to play Lego with my boys for the rest of my career.”

After the New Castle project featured in Houses magazine, St John Parsons posted on Instagram that he was “stoked”. He said he had bought his first copy of the architecture and design publication “after picking up my first pay cheque from Maccas as a pimply teenager”.

Another young practice, Architect George, won the Hugh and Eva Buhrich award for residential alterations and additions, for a home in Erskineville.

Modest in size at 95 square metres before the project began, the home was increased to 110 square metres with the addition of a minimalist double-height polycarbonate “lightbox”.

An adaptable curtain system enabled flexible occupancy and different uses of the spaces. Sydney architect Phillip Arnold wrote that the home for five was “delightfully weird, and could simultaneously be described as both a two-bedroom house and four-bedroom house … It is one of the ways this house makes no sense. Not meeting a conventional logic is one of the ways this house is very special and quite magical.”

Annabel Lahz, the jury chair, said the awarded projects highlighted the impact of architecture on everyday life. The NSW chapter president of the Institute of Architects, Elizabeth Carpenter, said they were a powerful reminder that architecture was both art and a responsibility.

Chris Minns gave the Premier’s Prize to the First Building by Hassell at Bradfield City Centre. It also won awards for sustainable architecture and commercial architecture.

Minns said: “Every new city requires a big dream ... it’s incredibly exciting to see that dream taking shape here in Bradfield.”

The Lord Mayor’s Prize went to the Rosebery Engine Yards project, a collection of brick factories and industrial sheds built between 1921 and 1940 that was adapted by GroupGSA into a shopping and commercial precinct.

“From a sustainable embodied carbon aspect, the least was done to make the biggest design difference,” the citation said.

Julie Power was a lay juror on the sustainability awards.

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