Moving Mountains

Assembly Architects designs a family compound in central Queenstown.

- Simon Farrell-Green

If you live in Queenstown, the house on these pages will be distinctly familiar. Located on a busy back street used by locals to scoot around all that heady tourism in downtown Queenstown proper, it occupies a prominent corner a few blocks from the centre, its twin viewfinder decks creating a friendly façade. Sometimes, it’s compared to E.T., sometimes binoculars; its giant numbers are hard to miss and it’s the first multi-storey development in the area thanks to recent changes in the district plan. “I don’t think we’ve ever done anything as graphic as this,” says architect Louise Wright of Assembly Architects. “It really strikes people.”

I say house, but it’s actually two three-storey townhouses on one site, a compound owned and used by one extended family. Owners Paddy and Brian Stafford-Bush live in Auckland but visit Queenstown almost monthly, where they ski, run, cycle and enjoy the glorious outdoors of the Lakes District by day, and its restaurants and big-little-town buzz by night. Their son Sam – a ski instructor – lives in Queenstown six months of the year, while daughter Mia and her family live in neighbouring Arrowtown.

After owning a holiday home nearby for years, the family bought the site – complete with a cold 1960s fibre-cement bungalow designed for summer occupation – and asked Assembly, who have worked with the family on a number of development projects in recent years, to look at what could be built. “We really wanted to be able to walk into Queenstown,” says Paddy, a keen mountain biker, “to be absorbed in the town, rather than be adjacent to it.”