There aren’t many homes in Aotearoa where the owners might need to put chains on their car tyres to navigate the driveway after snowfall; or homes that sit above the 400m altitude threshold and require extra strengthening to cope with the more extreme weather conditions; or homes that have a purpose-built bunker you can retreat to in the event of a wildfire.

But when you look out at the expansive views on offer from this home on the slopes of Little Mount Iron, a few kilometres from central Wānaka, you can see why Helen and Ian Clarke decided to build here. “We love looking out across there and seeing places where you can walk or ski,” says Helen. “Watching the weather around Hāwea and the inversion layer and how that moves around. Often in winter you get the fog marching up the Clutha River.” 

The Clarkes lived in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington for 25 years and Wānaka had historically been a place of leisure for them. Ian, who grew up on a farm in South Otago, spent his summer and winter holidays in the area and he and Helen visited on regular ski trips with their two sons. The pair had always wanted to spend more time in the mountains as they neared retirement age – and building a house on one is a good way to guarantee that. 

When they were looking at the two-hectare section, they quickly deduced many potential buyers would have been put off by the rocks, wilding pines and kānuka. “You had to see the vision of what could occur here,” says Helen, “and Ian being a farmer, he could see the potential.” 

They bought the land about seven years ago and set about upgrading the road, which was a major engineering task in itself. Services were also a challenge. A pump was required to get the council water supply up the hill, they needed to install their own septic tank, and stormwater was also problematic. “Nothing about it was straightforward,” Ian says. “But we weren’t daunted by any of the challenges – we just knew it would take longer.”

One day they drove past a house in Wānaka’s Peninsula Bay designed by architects Tim Lovell and Ana O’Connell, of Lovell & O’Connell Architects (LO’CA), for Tim’s parents. “We had an Ernst Plischke renovated house in Wellington, so we liked that slightly modernist look,” says Helen. They also liked all the built-in features, the bunkrooms, the stage for the grandkids to perform on, the liberal use of timber, and the dramatic roofline that draped itself over the building and provided shelter from the wind and sun. Helen and Ian also had a high level of trust in them and were open to pretty much all of their suggestions. As O’Connell says, “The question is not ‘What do you want the house to look like?’ It’s ‘How do you want to live?’ Then we can create the space to enable that.”

With a site like this, Lovell says the temptation is to go, “There it is, the view is all there.” That tends to lead to walls of glass, which is quite common in Wānaka. “But we were trying to pick specific views for each section of the house,” he says – and also make sure the owners didn’t overheat on a summer afternoon. The sloping roof form is a big part of that, says O’Connell, and having the house on one level meant it was hunkered down into the section. “The big eaves are pragmatic and offer shade, but it also means the roof becomes quite a separate element, a draped form, extending out.”

In the main entranceway hangs a Ben Timmins painting of a karearea that the Clarkes bought many years ago. Replicating New Zealand’s native falcon in building form wasn’t a factor in the design, Lovell says, but the shape of the roofline from certain points on the section reminded Ian and Helen of the bird’s wings, so they named the house Karaerea. (Fittingly, when they’ve been out in the garden, they have actually seen karearea flying past at eye level, presumably checking out their competition).