Leading international design magazine FRAME has announced the shortlist for its 2026 awards program, with The Forest one of only four Australian projects nominated globally for excellence in interior design.
The FRAME Awards is an international design awards program championing innovation across 23 spatial design categories. Organised by Dutch-born magazine of the same name, the FRAME Awards have been judged annually over the past nine years by a panel of 10 industry experts across architecture and design.
The 2026 Frame Awards attracted over 1,000 entries, from which a shortlist has been devised from the five highest-ranked entries in each category. Of the 115 spatial projects making up this year’s shortlist, only four Australian projects have been been featured.
Woods Bagot’s design for The Forest has been shortlisted for the “Institutions – Learning Space” category, garnering one of the highest jury rankings in its division across a criteria of innovation, functionality, form, and eco-social impact.
On this year’s calibre of entrants, a FRAME spokesperson said, “Taken together, the shortlist captures a spatial field in motion: retail is becoming increasingly atmospheric and multisensory, hospitality is leaning into ritual, landscape and bodily experience, and workplaces and institutions are being reorganized around adaptability, social exchange and care.
“Reuse, off-grid thinking, modular systems and structures conceived for second lives show resource consciousness moving upstream into the spatial brief itself, while homes, shops, transport hubs and exhibitions are stretching well beyond their familiar programmes. Boundaries are loosening too, as domestic space becomes communal, infrastructure absorbs hospitality and sensory intelligence, and temporary environments are designed to leave something useful behind.”
The Forest is a highly connected campus that unifies the existing onsite built elements with integrated landscape, through-block connections and publicly accessible thoroughfares.
As an example of mass timber construction, adaptive reuse, and the largest commercial use of hempcrete in Australia, the new campus combines innovative and experimental approaches to resilient and sustainable design while reviving an iconic piece of local heritage.
The Forest Videography: Peter Marko
In FRAME Magazine’s take, Hayley Dean writes of Woods Bagot’s revival of the former sawmill and ancillary buildings:
“A reinstated forested atrium sits beneath the restored 1997 conservatory dome, whose original indoor forest perished when Forestry Tasmania vacated in 2017. Woods Bagot brings it back as the civic heart of the campus: tree ferns and mature, ethically sourced plantings gather beneath the dome’s radiating timber gridshell. Visible water systems recreate the historical rivulets that once ran through the site. All of it is open to the public.
“Inside, the forest continues by analogy,” it continues. “”A faceted Tasmanian-timber ceiling, folded into a grid of inverted pyramids and uplit at its seams, hangs over the workspaces like a canopy; sawtooth clerestories cut into the roofline scatter angled shafts of daylight across the floor.”
The five highest-ranked entries in each category now move to the grand jury sessions from 22 to 25 September. Winners will be announced on 22 October.
The jury includes Michael Yarinsky (cofounder, Office of Tangible Spaces), Mustafa Khamash (creative director, Kart Group), Caroline Olah (founder, Reddie), Lucy Weatherall (creative services director, 1901), Ava Watson (founder, Resonance Foundation), Ralf Steinhauer (executive director, RSP), Joris Corthout (CEO, Prismax BV), Wei Jinjing (CEO, Nature Times Art Design), Stefania Digregorio (interior designer, Etereo), Kendra Robinson (design lead, Lemay).
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Media enquiries Isla Sutherland Content and Communications Manager (Australia & New Zealand)