Room With a View
_Words Melinda Williams
Photography Patrick Reynolds_
A cave-like cabin near queenstown is the ultimate mountain retreat.
When it comes to escaping – really escaping – the mountain cabin is a potent architectural symbol of retreat and solitude. Surrounded by trees, keeping a high watch over the landscape, and made of raw, natural materials, the mountain cabin houses hardy, pioneering, contemplative sorts: monks, woodsmen, nature-lovers. Of course, this mountain retreat, hidden in the Central Otago hills, is, in reality, only half an hour’s drive from the bright lights, crowded bars and adventure sports of Queenstown. But through clever use of siting and local materials, Fearon Hay have designed a modern cabin that feels like it is miles from civilisation, and carved out of the side of a mountain.
The approach to the cabin gives little clue to its existence. After climbing a steep road and descending a driveway, you eventually come to a flattened, gravelled platform jutting out from the side of the hill. “It’s almost like those switchbacks in European mountain roads, those places where you can stand and look out at the view,” explains architect Tim Hay. “That’s how we imagined it, and that’s how you arrive. You’re on a kind of terrace and you don’t really know there’s a building there. The only thing that gives it away is the handrail and the fireplace flue sticking up. The idea of discovering the building is there is cool.” On closer inspection, a small flight of stairs cuts into the platform, and as you descend them, you discover your arrival point was, in fact, the roof of a compact, two-bedroom cliffside cabin.
Inside, the house has the solid feel of a bunker, or even a cave carved out of the side of the hill. “It’s grunty,” Fearon puts it, succinctly. “For the exterior, we used heavily plastered schist, which gives the building a lot of solidity.” It also tonally blends the building into the hillside, a type of camouflage helped by the scree slope of crushed stones that falls away from the lower lip of the cabin. “We sited the cabin off the edge of the site rather than in the middle of it, which means that it’s quite discreet and when you’re down there, you feel quite secluded,” Fearon says. “It’s providing a ledge from which you can look out through the beech trees and over the landscape.” The house, as with much property in Queenstown, looks south, towards the lake and the mountains under the constantly shifting play of the sun.
The cabin is laid out simply: two bedrooms – the master room and a bunkroom – a bathroom, where the bath and shower can be closed off from the toilet and basin, and a living space encompassing kitchen and lounge. A sliding, cedar dividing wall along the horizontal axis of the space allows the bathroom and master bedroom to be screened off. “You can live with the whole thing open like a big studio or you can have a number of people in there. If you want to, you can lie in the bath and look out at the view,” says Fearon.
The interior of the cabin is classic Fearon Hay – sand-blasted precast concrete slab walls, concrete floor and a plastered ceiling to give a homogenous finish. “You end up with the feeling that the whole thing has been carved out of concrete.” The bath and benchtops are black basalt, and blackened steel panels in the kitchen match the window framing. Black metallic glass used for the shower panelling enhances the dark, cave-like feel, while throwing back reflections of the beech forest when the cedar door is rolled back. Erco lights, Boffi fittings and a suspended black fireplace add touches of luxury to the almost monastic space. “It’s got a little bit more comfort than a monastery,” Fearon admits. “But it definitely references that kind of asceticism. It’s deliberately been left as a fairly raw construction finish.”
The exterior, likewise, is almost rustic, but has been sharpened through the use of raw steel and floor-to-ceiling windows. “It’s all pretty traditional material used to reference the region, but it’s been crisped up a bit,” says Fearon. “The concrete and steel together with the heavily plastered schist and the fine steel window sections give it some refinement. The cantilevered corner helps too, in enhancing the sense of the house being carved out of a block.”
At just 100 square metres, this is one of the more compact projects Fearon Hay has taken on, but the structure of the building is no lightweight matter. “It’s quite intense construction for a small building, but that gave the durability and toughness that the client was after,” says Fearon. The cantilevered roof has the solidity to withstand the weight of snow mass. “You could drive a car down and park it on the roof,” says Hay. “It ain’t going nowhere.” That small scale was something the pair really enjoyed, he continues. “The programme is simple, so we really worked on the detail.” Fearon adds: “The client asked for something that was like a jewel-box, so it was great to work on something on that small scale but with the attention to detail.” u
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