APL Project Profile: Wanaka Luxury Lodge

The living pavilion runs west, offering large windows and 3-metre high doors to the sun for maximum passive heat gain. Double glazing was used with an Argon fill. The exterior joinery was in Silver Pearl powder coat with fascias in Sandstone Grey. The wooden piles supporting the living area and deck were flashed with folded steel in Sandstone Grey.

Queenstown designer Marc Scaife has been up to his old tricks again – using the APL Architectural Series in bold and edgy ways to enhance his sleek house architecture.

For a luxury lodge he designed at Wanaka, Scaife had the further encouragement of two innovative accomplices who built and developed the regally positioned, three-bedroom private retreat, which has jaw-dropping mountain views in all directions.

Wanaka Builder Nick Hay and business partner and plumber Nick Frame – the “Nick²” team for short – conspired to raise the design stakes even higher with a whole host of detailing and utility innovations that lifted the Release Private Retreat, as the dwelling is called, to a new level of architectural and eco-friendly accomplishment. Put these three creative people in the same room – or on the same building site – and the result is clearly fireworks, in an agreeable kind of way.

Scaife’s clean, bold design strokes shaped by 15-plus years of designing for the Otago climate have combined with Hay’s eye for detail and Frame’s pursuit of sustainability to produce a cracker of a showcase for the trio’s skill set.

Marc Scaife trained at Victoria University’s architecture school and has practiced in Queenstown for more than 15 years, mostly as a one-person operation, though latterly with a design assistant. His commissions have included houses, commercial lodges and apartments throughout Central Otago. “Maximising passive solar heat gain is important in this region so I like to have a generous northern elevation if I can manage it. Sometimes this isn’t possible because of the shape of the section or because the views lie south or east. In those cases you’ve got to bring the light in over the top through skylights or changes of level.”

Release Retreat sees Marc Scaife use almost the full toolbox from APL’s Architectural Series sliding door range in large, innovative configurations. He mixes one-track and two-track systems in the same opening, slides doors back over walls, and runs a continuous sliding system over two adjoining rooms. “If you work it through long enough,” says Scaife, “you find you can do almost anything.”

It also pays to have a cooperative and capable window manufacturer. Mark Robinson, director of Vantage fabricator, Aitken Joinery Ltd, in Gore, wrestled with the preferences of Scaife and Nick² to come up with the goods. In doing so he had to draw on his wide knowledge of Vantage extrusions and the way they could be adapted to achieve bespoke solutions.

“There were lots of little fiddly things that we had to do,” says Robinson. But “little fiddly” is something he does quite well – as a whole host of innovative residential and commercial jobs in Central Otago attest to. Builder Nick Hay was quick to credit Robinson: “His knowledge and help were very instrumental in helping me produce a finish that exceeded the usual parameters on what proved to be a fairly difficult project!

The ‘headline’ views west to the peaks of Mt Aspiring National Park are a powerful enticement for a designer with a Wanaka commission. But Marc Scaife is also mindful of the desirability of capturing northerly sunlight and warmth in the winter months.

Views west call for north-south alignment; northerly sun calls for an east-west axis. The T-shaped Release Retreat has a bob each way, with the bedrooms aligning north-south and the roomy acreage of the kitchen, dining and living area running west for maximum solar gain, but with generous glazing that still allows dreamy views to Treble Cone, sleeping glaciers and a picket fence of peaks on the Main Divide.

Above: The main sliding door set was 3.1m high and each panel 2.1m wide. The panel on the left slides back over a wall (and window) while the two doors on the right are double sliders, meaning that they can float to the right or the centre for maximum flexibility. See information and detailing for overwall sliders.

Above left and centre: In several of his residential projects Marc Scaife has used a single sliding window system over adjoining rooms. In this wing at Release Retreat the en-suite bathroom (at left in the exterior photo) was spanned by a single panel which withdraws back over a fixed light in the main bedroom. The moving panel on the right of the bedroom also shares the same fixed light.	Above right: Only exterior sliding windows or doors can be run across adjoining rooms, as in the Release Retreat bathroom/bedroom arrangement (joint detail shown above). This is because an interior sliding system would not allow the rooms to be sealed off from each other. Exterior sliders can be found in the APL Architectural Series, Metro Series, and an option also exists in the Vantage Residential range. The detail above shows how the window manufacturer has sealed off the two rooms, with a box section down the jamb (arrowed) and an infill at the sill (also arrowed) for a continuous frame line.

Above: Builder Nick Hay rebated the sliding door sills so that they were flush with the interior floor level. At the threshold to the covered exterior deck (above left) Hay used an aluminium angle, powder coated to the joinery colour, as an edge for the decking planks. The exterior decking was resized to match the interior plank width.

Above left: The solar hot water system, positioned at the rear of the property, has 30 evacuated tubes, which heat a 500L Green-glo cylinder. Solar heating was one of a number of eco-friendly initiatives included by developers, Nick Hay and Nick Frame. In mid-winter the hot water system may occasionally require boosting by electric heating. In other measures, grey water discharge is recycled through an irrigation system in the garden, and rain water is collected and stored in a 30,000-litre tank for general household use.

Above right: This window on a plaster-clad wall was set within a box frame for aesthetic reasons. Nick Hay applied a timber perimeter, overlayed building paper, then flashed it with folded steel in Sandstone Grey powder coat.