It’s not an understatement to say this is the stuff of dreams. Mataka Station sits on the Purerua Peninsula on the northern side of the Bay of Islands: 1148 hectares of spectacular farmland, with 16 kilometres of coastline, and hundreds of hectares of regenerating native bush, in which you’ll find the country’s largest private population of kiwi.
Lot 22 on the station is a 53-hectare piece of land with panoramic views over the Pacific Ocean – looking out to Ninepin and Hole in the Rock – and rolling rural countryside. From this gentle hilltop, the possibilities are endless – it’s the perfect spot for the right architect to design something remarkable. “The site’s set up high and you’ve got beach access below,” says Nick Roberts, a director at Roberts Gray Architects and winner of the Unbuilt category in last year’s Here Awards. “So there’s this sense of being up in the clouds in your own world, but you also have the benefits of beach access.”
Here and Future Isles’ David Maxwell have been working with the team at RGA to imagine what could happen on the site. Mataka is an exquisite spot – a landscape where rolling farmland meets the ocean, with white sandy beaches and rocky coves. It’s what people think of when they think of the Northland coast. Not surprisingly, it has a long Māori history: Mataka pā was one of the most significant Northern pā in pre-European times, and the station has more than 100 protected archaeological sites. It is very special indeed.
What makes it more special is its ownership structure: 30 owners share the working farm, with the right to roam over the whole property. This arrangement offers all the delights of big-station living, without the hassle of managing the land. Communal facilities include boatsheds and a beach pavilion, along with hiking trails and 20 kilometres of roads, allowing owners and their guests unique access to the various beaches, wetlands and native bush the property has to offer. A design committee, meanwhile, ensures that whatever is built here is of high quality, with strong design values.
RGA’s response to the site was typically elegant. Instead of building on or around the hill, Roberts and his co-directors Jimmy Gray and Elspeth Gray conceived a building that was buried into the hilltop, with cutaways creating lightwells, courtyards and voids through the building. “It’s not a singular object on the hillside – it’s a series of forms that can scale down and be added to, or removed,” says Roberts. “We like that it’s both emphatic and flexible as to how it could be built.” (It’s worth noting here that the concept is exactly that – a concept – and no consents have been sought.)
The design envisages a house that radiates across the hillside, both buried in and cutting through the topography. From afar, the shape of the hill is preserved. Cutaways and marks are softened with planting. Vaults, ellipses and sweeping curves create a formal structural language.
You approach the building from behind, and arrive into an entry area running onto a circular interior courtyard, lit from above by a skylight. On the seaside, bedroom wings sit at either end of the semi-circular plan, with multiple living areas fanning out between them. In each space, wide openings frame a different part of the view. “It means that every time you pop in and out of the hill, the site and the view are framed in different ways,” says Roberts.
It’s a flexible design – you could build all of it, or some of it; it could function as a home or a high-end retreat, or something in between. It’s a high-level concept, but Roberts sees it being built from low-carbon concrete (increasingly in use overseas and coming online in Aotearoa) and rammed earth, with natural, pink colours relating to the sand of the beach below.
As you’ll see from the renders, the design creates widescreen views, but frames them in particular ways as you move through the house. There’s nuance to that too. “The framed wing walls taper outwards, so instead of having a forced perspective, you have an expanding one,” Roberts says. “That heightens your senses as you move from space to space. Because the walls extend into the land, it makes it feel like its own private outlook.”
Lot 22, Mataka Station
385 Rangihoua Road, Kerikeri
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