Inside The World's Most Incredible Hidden Cabin (House Tour)

We wanted the architecture and the landscape to feel entwined, like a continuous naturalistic experience. We wanted it to be like a dance between these two aspects that form a continuous experience. I am Nicholas Stephens from Stephens Lawson Architects and I am the co-design lead on Te Mania. Te Mania is located in the Hawke's Bay region. It's situated at the base of Tamata Peak and looks out over the Tukituki River. These are two of Hawke's Bay's most iconic natural landforms. It is an area of outstanding natural beauty. It's also one of New Zealand's premium wine producing areas. Not a bad combination. Our client is part of a prestigious New Zealand winemaking family. He's an enthusiastic character and he is not afraid to break with convention. David wanted to be excited and challenged by the experience of architecture and as you can imagine this is music to an architect's ears and hence this moniker that developed for the project as the anti-house. On entering the property through a farm gate you descend a hill and you look across the avocado orchards and you see the house in the distance sitting on a plateau surrounded by this kind of rocky craggy landscape and you move towards that and you drive up and around into a very discreet car park. From there you move through a stone path walking through a landscape with a lake to one side and you come across this sculptural rusting steel structure which looks quite enigmatic and draws you in. It doesn't really have a front door per se because it's a building in the round and it's a building which is open to all sides. Upon entering you're in a space which is framing views of the river, of the orchards, of the small lake on the hillside and of course a very dramatic view back to Tamata Peak. Down one side of this room is a very long kitchen island counter made of black granite and that extends right out into the barbecue area. There's a large fireplace you know there's a beautiful lounge a dramatic sofa from Edra and a dining table designed by ourselves. It's a room which has got a sort of dark moody quality. On the northern side the house opens up to a big terrace with a dining table and soft seating and a freestanding fireplace which is really dramatic at night. From there you can look down the river valley you can look up to that dramatic view of Tamata Peak and also across the lake to one of the other sleeping houses. My favourite part of the house is where the ceiling folds up to take in the view of Tamata Peak. This was really something that I envisaged from the first moment I stepped on the site and it's very satisfying to see it borne out in reality in the finished product. This sculptural steel building with these apertures carved out of it and we wanted to use the most discreet the most invisible slimmest sections for the glass sliding doors and we use Vitroxa for this. One of the great benefits of Vitroxa is the way they can custom engineer their doors and windows for quite eccentric architectural uses. It really is quite remarkable when the doors are in fact closed they are barely visible. This is made even more pronounced by the fact that when they do open they completely slide into pockets in the walls. The largest of these sliding doors is the one that frames the view of Tamata Peak. They're 3.6 meter high doors of frameless glass so this is a customised system that they have engineered for us. They are insanely heavy but they glide absolutely perfectly. You could say that the Tamanu room is extroverted in contrast to the sleeping houses which are introverted and we wanted to create this real duality of experience something that was a bit more intense more deliberate. We wanted people to feel something. You could say the Tamanu room is a social theatre in contrast to the sleeping house which is more of a sanctuary retreat. These are more kind of cave-like semi-buried into a mounded landscape. They're quiet they're cocoon-like and of course you need to engage with the landscape when you move between these buildings so you're more aware of the light and the dark the cold or the wind or even the rain. It's a sort of an experience of being more engaged with the place where you are. The form of the buildings is very much an echo of this extraordinary landscape it sits in. There's the rocky outcrops of Tamata Peak and then there's the serpentine free-flowing shape of the river. These angular shapes you can see present in this building. This building needed to frame that landscape and it's wonderful now with the landscape becoming really established you have these changing views as the plants sort of slightly engulf the building and it feels pretty grounded it feels great. The materials generally are earthy and robust and raw. The Tamanu room is clad in cortian steel which is the weathering steel and it takes on this beautiful burnt red orangey tone which tones in beautifully with the dried grass of the area. When you move inside the Tamanu room it continues with these raw materials. The walls are a waxed raw steel which has a sort of a dark sheen it's quite atmospheric I'd say. The floors are in a natural slate which feels like it grounds the building really well. The ceiling is made of spotted gum it's timber slats which have acoustic insulation behind so the room has very beautiful acoustics. The sleeping house has a very different materiality it's made of in-situ cast concrete with a rough board pattern which has a sort of certain kind of rustic grunty kind of quality and as you move inside it has a softness it's a pale oak lining to the bedrooms that just gives a sort of a gentle softness for these spaces which are essentially quiet retreats. The tiles on the bathrooms are a mixture of white finger tiles and also a beautiful green finger tile and we wanted to create something special in these rooms these rooms that are often overlooked a bold color and in this case sort of this mossy green which gives the impression of a mossy green grotto that you're entering into. The Tamanu room is designed for socializing and entertaining it's got this epic kitchen and then hidden behind the walls is a commercial kitchen this can be opened up to the main space with a smoky glass screen which descends from above. You can open all the doors up to the barbecue area out to a big dining areas and an outdoor fire it's very much a house with fluid space therefore it can be open during an event or a party here but when there's fewer people here it can be closed off and you can just use the main kitchen in the space itself. I'm most proud of the way the architecture and the landscape entwines together to form some continuous experience that is both bold but also harmonious. We hope that visitors to this place will feel that their senses have been engaged that they've felt something something raw something visceral something a bit out of the ordinary and perhaps a little magical.