Fisher & Paykel Appliances creates a home for the next 100 years of innovation

Fisher & Paykel has established a purpose-built campus in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland that will serve as the global home of the brand and a luxury appliance innovation centre for research, industrial design, engineering, marketing, digital product design, testing and green energy solutions.

 

Built on a 22,779-square-metre site in the city where Fisher & Paykel was founded in 1934, the campus serves as the global headquarters for Fisher & Paykel Appliances and Haier Australasia.

Around 800 people—approximately 25% of Fisher & Paykel’s workforce—will be based on site when the campus opens, with the flexibility to accommodate many more as the company’s future innovation workforce grows.

It brings specialist design, digital and engineering laboratories, advanced testing facilities designed to replicate conditions across global markets, and collaborative workspaces together in one location. Together, these facilities support the development of leading products for Fisher & Paykel and Haier brands globally.

Along with Fisher & Paykel’s Dunedin innovation centre, the campus forms part of Haier Smart Home’s global innovation network, linking Fisher & Paykel teams and capabilities in Aotearoa New Zealand with colleagues and expertise around the world.

“This is a defining investment in the future of our business,” says Daniel Witten-Hannah, CEO of Fisher & Paykel Appliances.

“Over the past several years, we have developed a new generation of state-of-the-art appliances and complete home solutions. Now we have created an environment around the people, insights, brand, culture and capabilities that make them possible making ideas visible across design, engineering, marketing, prototyping and testing to accelerate what comes next.”

At the centre of the campus is an 11,500-square-metre, three-level mass timber office building, designed with architecture practice RTA Studio as a continuous loop around a regenerated wetland oasis.

 

“It touches the ground lightly, but we call it a ‘groundscraper’ because it does everything a skyscraper does, laid flat on the ground. It keeps people connected to one another, to the whenua and to the landscape around them,” says architect Richard Naish, Design Director and Founder of RTA Studio.

A two-level research, development and testing facility of approximately 5,000 square metres plugs directly into the mass timber building’s Social Kitchen, making product design, prototyping and testing visible from the heart of the workplace and integral to the daily life of the business.

In 2023, the building concept received a World Architecture Festival WAFX Award for Building Technology, recognising its innovative approach to timber architecture and lower-impact construction.

The mass timber building is upfront carbon positive: life-cycle analysis shows that it stores 1,089 tonnes CO₂e more than was emitted through material production and construction. Its timber diagrid accounts for 1,480 tonnes CO₂e of biogenic carbon sequestration.

 

The volume of timber used in the structure of one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s largest timber office buildings takes around three hours to grow in New Zealand plantation forests.

The campus’s carbon-led approach extends to its renewable energy infrastructure, developed by Fisher & Paykel Home Solutions.

Across the site, 1,159 solar panels are expected to generate 732 MWh of renewable energy each year—enough, on current modelling, to meet the mass timber building’s annual operational energy needs. The installation demonstrates Fisher & Paykel’s expertise in solar generation and connected energy systems at scale.

Fisher & Paykel teams are now moving into the campus ahead of its official opening in October 2026, which will be attended by representatives from Haier Smart Home’s global leadership team, project partners and invited guests.

“The most important products Fisher & Paykel will design haven’t been imagined yet. We’ve built a home for the people who will imagine and create them—and made a commitment that the next generation of innovation will come from Aotearoa New Zealand,” says Witten-Hannah.

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Photo credit: Biddi Rowley