By Assembly Architects
Butel Park, to the West of Arrowtown is a residential development intended to comprise houses that reflect the historic Arrowtown Character, identified as being a simple architectural vernacular sitting on large sections completed with extensive gardens and deciduous trees, and not dominated by garage doors. Like many developments in the Wakatipu, the area is subject to design controls and a design approval process, in regard to form, roof shape and pitch, and material controls.
Set back on its site against a reserve, the Wright house gives the majority of the site over to a leveled lawn, and garden. The simple cottage form and reduced pallette of colour and material play the house as recessive to the garden, and surrounding mountains.
The compact house is rectangular in form, with bedrooms split each side of a central living space. The central living area has a higher ceiling than the bedroom ends, however the whole roof is trussed with flat ceilings throughout. Externally the roofline has a cental raised portion of flatter pitch. The house is predominantly carpentry focussed, with a timber piled foundation. This enabled high speed construction techniques; the house took only 16 weeks to construct.
The design and construction privileges thermal performance, and as such utilises compact design form, airtightness, low volume mechanical heat recovery ventilation system, orientation, eaves and window placement to reduce summer solar gain and promote winter solar gain, superinsulation, thermal bridge reduction, low thermal mass, low energy lighting (primarily LED) and solar assisted hot water heating.
Having employed these techniques the house maintains ambient indoor temperatures with low energy electrical inputs.
The house was published in HOME New Zealand in 2014 and featured in the NZ House & Garden 2015 Queenstown Home Tour.
Assembly is an Arrowtown based architecture practice delivering exceptional architecture with personality, connection to landscape and considered construction.
We design homes and special projects in the Queenstown Lakes district, Wanaka and Central Otago. Current projects include heritage sensitive homes in Arrowtown, a rammed earth home in Wanaka, and distinctive new homes at Mount Cardrona Station, the Crown Terrace, Ben Lomond and Lowburn Mt Pisa.
Our homes are decidedly personal and individual, strongly connected to landscape, and expressed with detailed materiality. Design communication is huge to us. We utilise design tools that visually communicate the design in an engaging, interactive and visually realistic method.
Registered Architects Louise Wright and Justin Wright established Assembly in Wellington in 2005, and moved to Arrowtown in 2012. Our Arrowtown studio is situated on Arrow Lane in the heart of Arrowtown’s historic town centre.
The studio comprises a tight knit and talented team – Emma Schmitz, Marcus Kirk, Simon Khouri, Catarina Peeters and Matt Connolly, who together with Justin and Louise work in small teams to bring your design to life
In 2019 Assembly was a founding signatory to the NZ Architect’s Declare Climate & Biodiversity Emergency.
Assembly is a New Zealand Institute of Architects practice.