A new home in Tāhuna/Queenstown where the sky gets in before the mountains do.
Snow falls in the courtyard at the centre of this house. So does rain. A Japanese maple grows there, marking the seasons in the one outdoor space with no view — just sky, framed by a circular steel opening in the roof. In a house surrounded by mountains, the most memorable outlook is the one that looks straight up.
Rachel Hooke came home to Sydney from walking the Milford Track and found the South Island had followed her back. She and her husband, Brett Lunn, had spent years skiing, walking and cycling around Queenstown, borrowing its mountains for holidays and time away from busy work lives. In Dalefield, the pull found its place on a gently sloping section: Crown Terrace to the north, Coronet Peak to the northwest and The Remarkables appearing through a gap in the landform to the southeast. Plenty of houses in places like this hand themselves over to the hero view. This one asks for a little patience.
Engaging landscape designer Katie Deans before appointing an architect, the couple’s early thinking was already shaping how the house would meet the land.
On site with Barry Condon of Condon Scott Architects, Rachel and Brett came with clear instincts rather than a fixed image. They wanted clean lines, concrete, warmth and a house that didn’t repeat the schist-and-timber language common to the region. “He was so easygoing and listened to us,” says Rachel. The first renders arrived when Rachel was in Melbourne and Brett was in Sydney. They opened them separately, then rang each other straight away. Neither had known exactly what they wanted until they saw it.
Barry found his answer in a square. On a site with a defined building platform, a gentle fall and a biting southerly, the geometry organised shelter, outlook and movement. Garage and services sit below, lifting the main floor above the land. Through that upper level runs a boardform concrete spine, extending beyond the exterior edges and past the roofline. It carries structure, services, storage and the kitchen, shields the living area from wind and divides the open parts of the house from the quieter rooms beyond. “It’s not just a structural element,” says Barry. “It’s also organisational.”
Crucially, the wall delays the view. Arrival doesn’t give everything away. Guests come to the courtyard first: maple, cedar, concrete, sky. A gallery-like passage wraps this centre, with art on the walls and light shifting through the plan. Only then does the house hand over the mountains. “It’s not like you just step into the house and the view is yours,” says Brett. “You’re going to work for it.”
With scenery available on every side, Barry resisted giving each room the same full-volume experience. The living space takes in the larger sweep, the main bedroom and study eye up The Remarkables and the guest wing looks towards Coronet Peak. The courtyard refuses the mountains entirely. “When you sit in there, all you see is sky,” says Barry.
Out of that refusal came the oculus. Barry didn’t want hard-edged shadows in the courtyard, so the circle brought softer movement to the square geometry. The Japanese maple was part of the thinking too, a living marker of season, weather and light. “We wanted something in that space that just changed over time,” says Barry. The courtyard is spare by choice: no furniture, no styling, no attempt to make it useful in the ordinary sense. “We’ve put nothing in there,” says Rachel. “We’ve kept it very bare because we just love looking at it.” Weather moves through, the tree changes by the week and at night Brett has caught the moon held in the opening.
Daily life has settled into the rhythm of a house that expands without feeling oversized. Most of the time, Rachel and Brett live across one side of the plan: main bedroom, ensuite, office, kitchen, dining and living. When their adult children or friends arrive, the guest wing comes alive, with bedrooms, a bathroom and a bunk room that can close off as its own retreat. “We don’t need to go into the whole other wing unless people are here,” says Rachel.
Concrete, cedar, glass and steel carry the architecture, with exterior materials continuing inside so the house doesn’t shift tone at the threshold. Barry developed the interior architecture and early material direction, then worked with Tara Kerse of Studio Noema on the final layers. Tara, who’s Sydney-based, had worked with Rachel and Brett before. Her contribution is felt most in the rooms that draw away from the panorama. The guest rooms were given names inspired by the surrounding terrain: Gully, Anthracite, Summit and Russet. Each carries its own palette, linked to the colours beyond the glass. Rachel found the bathrooms difficult to resolve, but Tara’s eye gave them direction, carrying stone through the ensuite, bedside pieces and entry furniture. “They’re all tied together, but they have their own identity,” says Rachel.
That confidence carries into the kitchen. Joinery recedes into the spine wall, and the benchtop runs up the splashback without interruption. Rachel and Brett considered stools at the island, then let the form stand on its own. “We decided to back ourselves and I’m glad we did,” says Rachel. “It’s huge. It just sits there. Monolithic. It’s one of the most beautiful lines.”
Rachel’s favourite moment of arrival happens before the front door, on the external stairs that rise from the driveway to a landing where people tend to stop and take in the view. Brett’s was inside. Walking towards the kitchen early one winter morning, soon after moving in, he found the corridor blazing with orange-red light, sunrise reflected the full length of the polished-concrete floor. He hadn’t known the house would do that. He took a photograph.
The landscape is vast and always changing, yet the house keeps returning Rachel and Brett to smaller acts of attention: sky first, then the mountains beyond.
Words Alice Lines
Photography Biddi Rowley
The post The Tāhuna/Queenstown house that makes you earn the view appeared first on Homestyle.
