A Night We’ll Never Forget – CRJ Designer Homes Takes Home Four Master Builders Awards

There are some nights in business that you know you’ll remember for a very long time. The 2026 Master Builders Wide Bay Burnett Housing & Construction Awards was certainly one of those for us.

We went into the evening incredibly proud to have Verona House recognised amongst some of the best building projects in our region. We knew how much work had gone into this home, how many decisions had been made along the way and just how special the finished result was.

What we weren’t prepared for was hearing CRJ Designer Homes called four times.

Verona House by CRJ Designer Homes was awarded:

• House of the Year
• Individual Home from $2 million up to $2.5 million
• Best Residential Kitchen
• Best Residential Bathroom

To say it was a big night for our little team would probably be an understatement.

More Than Just a Beautiful Home

Verona House is a home we are immensely proud of, but not simply because of how it looks.

It is the culmination of great design, beautiful materials, careful planning and an enormous amount of workmanship behind the scenes.

As a custom builder, we have never wanted to build the same home over and over again. Every client comes to us with a different block of land, a different lifestyle and a different idea of what “home” should feel like.

Our job is to bring all of those pieces together.

Verona House gave us the opportunity to do exactly that on a very special scale. There are beautiful features throughout the home, but it is the way they all work together that we love most. From the kitchen and bathrooms through to the finishes, joinery and finer details, everything was considered as part of the whole home rather than in isolation.

Winning Best Residential Kitchen and Best Residential Bathroom was particularly special because these are spaces where so much thought goes into both the design and the way they will actually be lived in every day.

House of the Year

When House of the Year was announced, it genuinely took a moment to sink in.

CRJ has been building homes in the Bundaberg region for 20 years. We have never set out to be the biggest builder. We have always wanted to remain hands-on, to know our clients, to know what is happening on our sites and to build homes we are proud to put our name to.

To have that approach recognised by Master Builders means a great deal to both of us.

But these awards don’t belong to Michael and Gillian alone.

They belong to the entire CRJ team, our trades, suppliers and the people who consistently turn up and care about the standard of their work. Custom homes require a lot of people working together, and Verona House is a wonderful example of what can be achieved when you have a great team behind a project.

And, of course, none of it happens without clients who trust us with something as personal as their home.

Four awards in one night was something we never expected.

Twenty years into CRJ, it was a pretty special reminder of why we still love what we do.

And we’re very proud to bring House of the Year home to Bundaberg.