At the end of   May, when entries close on the Interior Design Excellence Awards, Australia's largest and most prestigious interior design competition, hundreds of inspiring designs that render building shells or house revamps so brilliantly habitable will be laid out before expert judges.
Over coming months, peer architects and interior designers will assess the diverse offerings in 11 categories and five special awards for the best of the best in residential, commercial, hospitality, events, retail, lighting, furniture and other sectors. 
At the time of the IDEA gala evening in   November, the winning entries, and indeed most of the 120 shortlisted projects, will constitute a stunning portfolio of leading-edge projects that will have a multi-directional and protracted impact on the local design culture and, more broadly, on the increasingly literate residential design consumer.
Patrick Kennedy, architect and partner in Melbourne's Kennedy Nolan, who was an IDEA judge last year, and in 2014 with practice colleague Rachel Nolan, winner of the overall residential award, agrees that Australians are becoming more informed about design.
"But", he warns, "this can be a double-edged sword because it can reduce design to styling, and create fetish (fashionable name) designers.
"I would hope that we've begun to take the next step, and that people are beginning to understand that good domestic design is much more than a laundry list of rooms. 
"And yes, the way it looks is important. But every design professional is thinking about space in a much more complex way.
"Our intent is to make memorable spaces. We're concerned about the way things are made and the relationship between spaces. We're concerned with the balances between the landscape and the built form. In these and so many other ways, architecture and interior design can influence the very quality of your life."
In a country that by the early 2000s was building some of the biggest houses on the planet, Kennedy detects some telling amendments that are reshaping the Australian home in 2016. He lists:
     More modestly scaled houses. "We're interested in smaller, more efficient homes."
     Higher quality, lower maintenance and more durable building materials. "There is a renewed interest in brick, an old-fashioned, climatically appropriate material that people are working with in very creative ways." Zinc, copper, metals and even timbers "that patinate with age, are part of the exploration of materials with longevity". Feature concrete and form-cast concrete also come into this suite.
     It's less about trends and more about "being responsive to the client, the context and that a building genuinely suits its purpose. This is leading to a greater diversity in housing forms. The least interesting architecture is about visual styling. The most interesting is very client and purpose specific."
     Intrigue with texture and crafted materials is being reflected "in a great interest in hand-made things that show a human quality".
     Architects and designers are also having a greater impact on apartment lifestyles. Whereas unit design was once "wholly controlled by developers, more architects such as Jeremy McLeod with his five-level Nightingale Apartments (in Brunswick, Vic), and Kerstin Thompson are taking back some ground and thinking about apartments as being about more than profit yields. In his Darlinghurst apartment, for example, Brad Swartz did more with less space in an incredibly inventive investigation of 3D design."    
idea-awards.com.au