In New Zealand and Australia, farms have developed organically usually along a gravel
track with various sheds for various activities handed over the years, in Europe it's different,
farm buildings are usually arranged around a courtyard or a farm yard in this house we've
tried to follow the Australian and New Zealand tradition of a casual farm lane way or street.
This house is located in the wider Queenstown district which is in New Zealand's southernmost
alps. A mountainous area of lakes and rivers. The house is maybe 30 minutes out of town and what's
called The Wakatipu Basin it sits on two glacial terraces. The house's vineyard is on one terrace,
the house with a wonderful aspect down to The Shotover River is on the lower terrace.
Queenstown and this particular site you know extremely cold in winter with searing heat in
summer, so the house has to be designed for all of those seasonal changes. The
name for this project is Pouaka Waikura which means rust sheds which goes right back to the
client's brief of having small, simple built forms referencing their old settlers cottage.
The pavilions are laid out more or less parallel with the edge of the terrace and
the drop away views and are also a nod to The Shotover River which twists around the view.
Each of those pavilions is afforded a kind of unique framed kind of views up to Coronet Peak,
down to The Shotover River and to the wider landscape beyond.
What we've done is we've threaded a gravel rural farm road through the terrace,
it starts off with a guest cottage and then there's a porte cochère garage
going forward, then there's the main house which is just a single bedroom and main living
room between the guest cottage and the main house is the outdoor coming together area and
then further on we go to the maintenance workshop for the mechanics of the family.
This project had a really unique brief in that the clients wanted separate little buildings
and were happy to be walking from one to the other
in the open environment and the elements like you would in a rural farm setting.
The movement between the pavilions is as important in this project as the spaces in them,
unlike a traditional home where you move in hallways between spaces here we move outside
from one area to another and that link with the landscape and the environment is really important.
The house is designed for multiple styles of occupation, either just the clients on their own
or with you know different generations of family joining them in the guest house,
the open and closing of those pavilions and the linkages between them allow people
to move between them, be together or separate in the different buildings.
The individual pavilions also provide a lock-up and-leave type of living you can lock that
pavilion down and have it unheated and unserviced and live in the main pavilion very comfortably.
The materials for this project were all selected for their honesty, robustness and natural surface
treatment. COR-TEN steel panels left to rust naturally, black steel waxed,
timber naturally oiled and in-situ concrete all coming together simply with minimalist detailing.
In this region, high alpine region, metal does not rust away in fact in the farms around here
you can see old abandoned hay balers and machinery that have been here for decades
in a beautiful patinated rust, so COR-TEN steel is a very good material for this kind of place,
its colour is in with the place too because the region is famous
for its autumn colours and the browns and golds and rust colours of the landscape.
In a lot of cultures you want to have a balance of materials and metal and fire
and water are part of those materials and here I think the metal of the house will
patina with age like an old trophy cup, just get better and better.
Each of the COR-TEN rust-coloured sheds has a core of in situ concrete
just anchoring the building, it's a very common thing in rural buildings to have.
In contrast to the paired back nature and minimalist detailing of the house,
the clients have opted to bring in family heirloom pieces from the old cottage together
with you know fun colourful eclectic pieces of furniture. The timber cabinetry provides a
beautiful spine wall to the rear of the house linking the living space with the bedroom and
providing full-height storage and deep window reveals to shutters viewing the rear terrace.
The kitchen is created using waxed black steel panels, flashly detailed and arranged randomly
in a nod to the exterior COR-TEN panelling. Belgian Blue Stone has been used to create
the bench tops and the wall splashbacks which is full of small fossils and veining
referencing the fingerprinting and natural patina of the black steel.
The dark kitchen tones beautifully frame the large awning window providing views down to The Shotover
River, that dark calming material is a great contrast to the light full space of the living
area, I think the house from a distance for me is something that that we're really pleased with
because it blends into its bracken and tussock environment and the hues of the landscape,
the cladding and the breaking up of the form of the building when you add it together it's
quite a big house but each one and it's just in itself is just a little cottage.
Embracing patina and the natural aging process of objects and the
landscape is a beautiful part of the process and here these built
forms will meld into the landscape over time and become part of it.
This project gets better and better with age the COR-TEN panels are
better each time. I see it and the concrete has weathered beautifully,
I think this house will be better in 50 years than it is now.