Mataka Station is a working farm as well as a subdivision: 1,148 hectares held by 30 owners, with 800 hectares of protected pasture leased back to the station and a further 350-hectare conservation covenant fenced off for regenerating bush and one of the largest kiwi populations on private land in the country. Owners share a beach lodge, a boat ramp at Whale Bay, and a 50-minute helicopter transfer to Auckland.

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Here, on a hilltop lot, Future Isles David Maxwell has commissioned Keshaw McArthur, the Auckland practice behind the award-winning Openfield House and Ridge House, to imagine what might be possible.

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Keshaw McArthur Founders Katrina Keshaw and Xuân McArthur Nguyen worked from the site's 360-degree arc, from winter sunrise on one flank to summer sunset on the other. It’s a suggestion of how a house might sit in the ridge, oriented to the sun's long traverse rather than to a single view. (It’s also a possibility rather than a prescription, leaving purchasers to develop the site with their own architect under the station's design guidelines.)

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Burying itself into the ridge, the house is essentially a collection three boxes arranged on a terrace around a central courtyard. Circulation, delightfully, is outside via the terrace – creating an intimate engagement with the North’s mild climate. There’s no formal entry: instead, you approach the house from the north, up a flight of stairs and onto the terrace. To the east – and the view to Rangihoua Bay – is the main pavilion, housing living spaces and the primary suite. To the north, there’s another pavilion housing three further bedrooms and a gym. To the west, a guest suite. In the final corner: an elevated swimming pool terrace. 

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It is bare land, in other words, in a place that has spent two centuries accumulating meaning: first as Ngāti Torehina and Ngāpuhi land, then as the site of the country's first mission, then as one of 30 tightly guarded house sites on a station built explicitly to keep its coastline whole. Whoever buys it takes on the job of adding one more chapter, carefully.

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Lot 26, Mataka Station, Kerikeri 

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David Maxwell, Future Isles

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futureisles.com

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