Inside New Zealand’s Most Breathtaking Home Shaped by Nature (House Tour)

This region is a really magical place, and it's a very powerful place. The clouds tend to hug the mountains, so you get this layered effect of misty mountains throughout the day, which is quite beautiful. It just has this natural beauty that is truly hard to describe. So what we've tried to do here is bottle that experience within the house. I'm Rich Nash, Design Director of RTA Studio and Design Architect of the Kaweria House. The brief of this house was all about lifestyle and location. The family that briefed me, they're very much into the outdoor, the outdoor activities, the keen trampers, skiers, mountain bikers. So this is a wonderful playground for them. And then it was also to be a house that was appropriate for this landscape. When we considered the concept of this house, we really deeply researched a lot of things, particularly around the pre-European occupation of the land, the Kaweria particularly. It's an unusual bird in that it nests in the landscape, it nests on the ground in what's called a scrape. It finds a sheltered lee side of a rock and lays its eggs in a scrape in the ground and then protects those eggs. So that was really the first move of setting the house respectfully on the levels in the landscape with these rock walls that define the views. And then the final move was the protective roof that lays across the top of the house. The approach of the site is quite important. When you sort of drive up the driveway, there's a sense that the house is slightly sunken in behind a rolling piece of land and tussock. And then it reveals itself slowly. You approach the front door and these extending schist walls are metaphorically like the landscape sort of lifting up out of the ground and just sort of forming barriers and walls that guide you towards the entrance. So you enter the house on the first and upper level, which is only three or four steps above the next level. And that's the entry level and the living room level. You then just drop down a few steps and you come to the sort of relaxed open plan kitchen dining space with the morning and afternoon terrace offering itself off either side. And then that leads through to a slightly more secluded chill out space where the bedrooms are accessed. And as you access the bedrooms, you drop down a third lower level where the primary suite is at the lowest level of the house. And so the house is very carefully stepped down over the site. My name is Annique Heeson and I'm from Gezellig Interiors. And we were involved with a collaboration on the interiors at the project here. Bendemeer is a very interesting development in that it has so many different moods and almost views as the day goes on. And one day you can get 15 completely different looking landscapes. So when selecting the materials, it's just really about having an interior that was just a tribute to the landscape and that worked in different lights and different shades of light on a cold day, on a warm day, sunny day, snowy day. So selecting the materials was really about something that was really natural in its base. And that was even a challenge for myself in the studio in this project. And it's just about how do we be really restrained? How do we take away all the fuss? And I think you always want to do more, but almost doing less takes more. You have to go, what are the core values of what we're trying to achieve and keep coming back to those. And that was really important for this project was just being true to those core values, being true to the landscape and keeping the house quiet, which is really hard to do. Because you always sort of want to introduce something new and we just had to be really considerate. And so the way we've designed the kitchen is it has an open kitchen out in the dining space, which makes it a relaxed place where you can prepare and cook food in a social sort of environment. And then of course, we've created a scullery, which has a sort of secret door that closes it off. So you can have quite a bit of mess and preparation and things going on in that space while your front space is still uncluttered and all the chaos can be going on in the background. Or if it was the evening, we could open up the Western sliders and then the barbecue can be going on and facilitating that social arrangement. Fisher & Paykel have got a really clever set of appliances. So in the kitchen, we've integrated some of them and some of them are on display. The ovens, for example, they sit there really nicely. But we've concealed the column refrigerators. They're a great piece of technology, but they just sit in behind secret doors. And then on the other side of the island unit, we've got the cool drawers and they're a really nice piece of technology. They just allow you to have your wine cool in there and bring it up almost like a bartender straight out of the fridge onto the countertop. So there's a lot of freedom in the way that we can use these appliances in a well-designed kitchen. It was really important this house blended into the architecture. It was one with the landscape. So that balance was really easy to create here. We used predominantly natural materials. I actually looked to a lot of the elements that I collected from around the little lake that sits outside the house. And that kind of informed a lot of my selections for not just the hard materials, but also the soft materials. So I looked to bracken and dried leaves for the colours of the curtains and the colours of the upholstery. And I think it's really about having that same juxtaposition that we see in nature. Where you've got a really hard rock face and then beautiful soft moss growing down the side of it. It's about creating those connections in a way that they sit together really beautifully. And that really gives that flow and that feeling to it. The views from inside to out are very carefully curated. As we move around to the west, there's a very lovely framed view centred on the Coronet Peak view. And then we come to the mid-level of the house where the roof is sort of at that mid-level as well. But we've been very careful just to allow that roof to lift just enough to let you see the top of the ranges out towards the eastern direction towards Cardona. So it's really just about carefully considering the views, the frame and the amount of light. The relationship with the walls and the roof and the floor that just really celebrate and honour the natural landscape. I think the thing I'm most proud of with this house is the way that it really does sit and honour the landscape. And it really connects with the landscape in a way that heightens the experience of visiting this region. If you were to stand here on the site without the house, which I did before we designed it, you want the finished experience of the project to be greater than that experience of standing there. So architecture can amplify the quality of the place and the power of the place.