Base Camp

Vaughn McQuarrie draws on the bivouac tradition to design an enigmatic little house near Queenstown.

- Matt Philp

The first time architect Vaughn McQuarrie met his clients on site, they were about to leave on a 12-day back-country tramp, with no fixed route and plans to sleep rough “under logs and rocks”. The conceptual die was cast: a ‘Bivvy’ house. As McQuarrie looked around the building platform, carved out of a sub-alpine, schist-heavy hillside above the Queenstown-Glenorchy Rd, he had a further thought. “We began to imagine the house was formed around large fragments leftduring the excavation – a rock bivvy, perhaps.”

Bivouacs by definition are insubstantial. By contrast, the house that McQuarrie designed for Australia-based Alan Luckie and Jen Arnold feels hewn by natural forces, all heft and raw elements. A series of stepping stones curve through screen towards an opening in the house’s angular concrete panels, then disappear into darkness. It’s less of a front entrance than a cleft in a rock face.

The owners have an unconventional partnership. Arnold, an expat Southlander, practises in Sydney, Luckie, originally from the Waikato, lives and works in Victoria, where a few years ago he built a highly idiosyncratic house in Bethanga that won an Australian National Architecture sustainable architecture award. They have a long-standing tradition of flying to Queenstown several times a year to hike in the backcountry or ski.

The Bethanga house clued in Waiheke Island-based McQuarrie to their mindset. “It showed that, as far as architecture goes, they were prepared to push the boat out.”

If there were constraints, they arose from the site, which looks south-east over Wakatipu to Walter and Cecil Peaks and The Remarkables, and is exposed to some brutal weather.