Fearon Hay Has Created A Moody Retreat In The Mountains Near Arrowtown.

Its almost filmic. After turning off the main road to Gibbston and up the switchback Crown Range Road, you turn onto a rutted gravel driveway and a dark house in the distance flits in and out of view.

- Simon Farrell

As the road swings and turns, the house is sometimes there and sometimes not, a shadowy shape on the horizon backed by the Remarkables mountain range. The view takes in a wide sweep from the Remarkables to Coronet Peak, looking down the valley towards Queenstown.

Owners Bentley de Beyer and Dean Sharpe live in New York, but have maintained a strong architectural connection to New Zealand in their 15-year absence. They own a Gordon Moller-designed beach house at Orua Bay, on the Awhitu Peninsula and, until recently, owned a Franz Iseke home and an original 1970s Rigby Mullan house in Sharpe’s home town of Thames, which featured in the February/March 2015 issue of this magazine. (Don’t worry: they’ve both been sold to friends and are in good hands.)

Six years ago, the pair was in stop-start discussions with Fearon Hay to build a house in an isolated rural spot between Kawhia Harbour and Raglan. Then, on a visit to Queenstown for a friend’s wedding, de Beyer found a gently sloping piece of land on the Crown Terrace with consented plans for a home designed by none other than Fearon Hay. They stood and looked at the view, and that piece of land, and fell in love. A few months later, construction began.

Several years earlier, Fearon Hay had designed the home for Australian clients, who had taken the project all the way through to building consent before putting it back on the market. “It was such a field,” says JeffFearon, recalling their first visit to the site, on a plateau below the Crown Range with views in almost every direction.

“We quickly came up with the idea that you want a sense of exposure, but that you also want to corral the wagons – arrange a series of buildings around a courtyard that protect the view but give you a nucleus inside the building.”