Fearon Hay and Katie Lockhart Studio made this one-bedroom stay on a hillside above Lake Wakatipu, with a living-room corner that slides away to the deck.
Nothing to see but trees, nothing to hear but birds. Terry Chu and Iris Ma drove out from Tāhuna/Queenstown into the Moke Valley to sit among them anyway, seeing whether the place did anything to them. They didn’t own any of it yet. “It was so calm,” says Terry. “So embraced by the mountains, the trees and nature. We’d go there every two days just to get the feeling of it.” One afternoon they stopped weighing it up and bought the section.
Most of those trees were wilding pines, a pest across Otago that the council wanted gone, so out they came, and the view they’d been blocking appeared: Lake Wakatipu below, flat and enormous.
Terry came to Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland from Hong Kong as a boy and went back for work, and it was there he met Iris. They travelled home to Aotearoa often enough that the idea took hold, and moved to Queenstown with their two sons once the city stopped being what either of them was after. Neither had built before, and what they had in mind was somewhere for other people to stay: five cabins on the slope, starting with one. “It’s a shame to just build a normal cabin there,” says Terry. “You’ve wasted the place.”
They went looking for an architect knowing what they didn’t want: nothing loud, nothing flashy. Terry had followed Fearon Hay’s work for years and liked how little of it announced itself. “I always thought it’s the hardest thing to do, the simplest thing,” he says. “Like how the Japanese do it. It’s always in the details.” Tim Hay and Jeff Fearon came down and walked the slope before anything was drawn. “What appealed was the opportunity to make something very small within such a dramatic landscape,” says Tim. Long-standing collaborators interior designer Katie Lockhart and landscape designer Andy Hamilton were brought onto the project at the same time.
“I wanted the cabins to be comfortable enough but not too comfortable, so people still go out and enjoy this place,” says Terry. Tim took that as licence to reduce the plan to what a few nights require. “It can be distilled down to the things that matter for a short retreat,” he says. “Somewhere to cook, sleep, sit, read, look at the landscape and disconnect.” There’s an outdoor hot tub, a fire, and a properly equipped kitchen, with Queenstown 15 minutes back down the valley for supplies.
The hill made most of the other decisions. It falls away sharply enough that cutting a platform would have meant reshaping the ground, so the structure stands clear on slender steel legs and braces, touching down in as few places as it can. It was made in pieces off site and put together up there. “The cabin sits lightly within the landscape,” says Tim.
Climbing from the main road through bush, you don’t see the cabin until you’re nearly on it. Cross the deck, step inside and it’s all here. The living end is the open one, the roof lifting, the lake a long way below. Then it narrows and the ceiling comes down, bathroom on one side and storage on the other, before opening again into the bedroom, raised a step, the bed sunk to the height of the window so whoever’s in it lies level with the view: 80sqm for two people, and the whole of it in about 15 paces.
“In order to add things, you subtract things,” says Terry, and the living space is where that shows. There’s no balcony. The whole wall of glazing slides back on a cantilevered steel frame. In summer the room stands open all day: roof, floor, nature and nothing in between.
Weather is the other occupant. Some mornings the valley fills with cloud and the lake goes under it, a white floor laid out below the cabin with the far tops standing clear. None of it moves until the sun comes round the ranges, and there’s no reason to hurry it: a brew, the fire lit, breakfast when you get to it.
Cedar clads the cabin inside and out, stained dark. Terry watched it go on and the building disappear into the bark behind it. Inside, the same timber runs warmer and the rooms are dark, which is how Katie found them. “You feel held by the architecture in such a vast landscape,” she says.
Coming to the interiors with the plan settled suits the way Katie and Fearon Hay operate: they brief her, then leave her alone with it to think. What she brought back changed the room. The furniture on the plan was all loose — a sofa, an armchair, dining table and chairs — and she had it drawn into the architecture instead. “It felt more like a boat,” says Katie. “Everything was built in. It’s super efficient.”
Trusting the people he’d chosen to know better than he did, Terry handed Katie the interior almost entirely. Both the cabin and the country it sits in read to her as strong and masculine, and she wanted the rooms to answer that: soft pastel bedding, raspberry rugs, glass and pottery with some give in their shape. “I wanted to balance out that strength with some feminine energy,” she says.
As spring turns to summer, dusk stretches out for hours, and when it finally goes there’s nothing out there but stars. Unlit, the room could have felt cavernous, so Katie designed lanterns and had them made by Grant Bailey. Delicate to look at, built to take a season of guests, in perspex rather than paper, which is the whole cabin interpreted in one object. “The nice thing is that it reveals itself slowly,” she says. “You notice what we all see, and when day turns to night there’s more to discover.”
Farming cleared the valley long before the cabin, and the native beech that belongs here hangs on in pockets high on the slopes above. Andy Hamilton’s planting is putting some of it back, and will be for years yet. Four more cabins will follow on the slope in time.
Terry and Iris measure the place simply enough: they want people to leave happier than they arrived. They rarely meet them, but they clean it themselves between stays, and a place handed back tidier than they found it tells them plenty.
Words Alice Lines
Photography Sam Hartnett
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