Embedded in the side of a valley in New Zealand’s Southern Alps, facing out over pristine Lake Wanaka, stands a new home meant to look as though it is part of the land around it. “It resembles the large schist rocks you see all over this region that are half-buried in the hillside and poke out at strange angles,” says Andrew Simpson of WireDog Architecture, the Wellington-based firm that designed it.

Simpson’s client was Nigel Greening, a British-born former advertising creative director and musician who is now the proprietor of a local winery, Felton Road. Nigel, his wife, Kharis, and their two school-age children still live part of the time in England, but with plans to spend more of the year on New Zealand’s South Island, their brief for WireDog called for all the amenities of a primary residence—plus an extensive wine cellar.

As Nigel and Simpson grappled with how to respectfully develop the enviable site, they kept returning to the idea of a rammed earth structure with an outer cladding of cedar and zinc-coated aluminum. “Rammed earth really fit with Nigel’s occupation as a winemaker and his connection to the soil,” says Simpson. “And in this cold, dry climate, it worked very well practically as the structural basis for the house.”

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The building technique is ancient and involves compacting successive layers of earth in wood frames. Since the 1970s, it has undergone a renaissance as a cost- and energy-efficient construction alternative. Like rock or brick, rammed earth forms a large thermal mass that balances extremes of temperature, absorbing and slowly releasing heat indoors during the winter and, especially when coupled with roof overhangs, keeping interiors cool in the summer. As an added benefit, the material can have a pleasingly stratified texture left by the molds, similar to sedimentary rock formations.

Simpson conceived the structure as a series of squared-off tubes, each containing a specific function. One end of each volume is partly submerged in the terrain, while the other is cantilevered over the slope with triple-glazed windows providing views of the kanuka trees tumbling down the hillside to the edge of Lake Wanaka, with the snow-capped mountains circling in the distance.

The front door is at the highest point of the house. An inconspicuous entryway contains a narrow stairwell that turns at an acute angle between tall earthen walls. Only the children’s rooms, some storage, and a bathroom are located on the top level. “There’s no grand entrance or big reveal when you enter—it’s more like descending into an ancient tomb,” says Simpson.

Down on the main floor there’s a study, a music room, and, at a slightly lower level, a kitchen/dining area and living room, which flows into a deck with cutaways in its walls to frame the view. The slanted ceiling in the dining area stops short of one wall, which travels up to a skylight, like a gap between two boulders that lets the light through. “I was thinking of a natural rock formation, like a canyon, where there are high walls around you that hide everything but the sky,” says Simpson.

Down another short set of stairs, at the lowest point of the house, sits the master suite. The entire house wraps around a multilevel stone-chip courtyard, creating sightlines and connections between the seemingly disparate volumes.

Nigel was heavily involved in the interior design and built all the home’s tables and beds himself. For the floors and ceilings, he chose reclaimed native rimu wood from a demolition that took place following the 2011 earthquake in Christchurch. “The imperfection of the timber really adds to the character of the interior spaces, because it has this incredibly rich luster to it,” says Simpson. The rimu is complemented by the cabinetry’s inexpensive combination of bamboo and strandboard, which has a grainy texture reminiscent of flattened wood chips.

Though a few walls are plastered, there are no painted surfaces in the house, and the family has decided not to hang any of their art. Instead, the unadorned natural textures of reclaimed wood and rammed earth give the space a primitive quality, which Simpson accentuated by carving niches at varying heights to hold bric-a-brac that Nigel collects from charity stores and junk shops.

“While there are generous parts of the house, like the very large wine cellar, you never feel like you’re drowning in space,” says Simpson. “It’s large, but not massive. Instead, we aimed to create intimacy and poetry in every space.”

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Project Credits:

Architect of Record: WireDog Architecture

General Contractor: Dunlop Builders

Structural Engineer: Spencer Holmes

Rammed Earth: Down to Earth Building

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