It is an understatement to describe Mount Algidus, a 53,000-acre cattle station on New Zealand’s South Island, as isolated. It occupies the high country between two great rivers and the Southern Alps. The last few miles of the two-hour drive from Christchurch require a steady nerve and a 4×4, but even that track comes to an end at the banks of the mighty Wilberforce. To make the crossing to the station, you need to climb into a powerful tractor or perch in its trailer for the lurching journey across the pebble-strewn flats and the icy channels of the river. Upstream on the far bank is a grassy plateau with one of the most breathtaking views in the world, and it is here that the owners of the station, Jane and Jamie Smiley, have built a house. And what a house it is.
Lucas Allen
Anyone building a house from scratch needs vision and patience, doubly so if the site is remote. To build this house, all materials – from the shingles for the roof, the stone for the floors, the reclaimed oak beams and every pipe and sack of cement – had to be transported across the wide and ever-shifting river, which can be placid one day and a raging torrent the next. A good deal of courage is also required, as well as an exceptional band of designers, engineers, architects and craftsmen.
The Smileys had the required vision, patience and courage, and they also chose their collaborators with care. Jane could picture the house in her mind and Charlie Nott, a New Zealand architect, made it a reality, one that married a conventional aesthetic with modern comfort. Clive Barrington was the builder whose workforce lived on site for weeks at a time, occupying the quarters and cookhouse once used by the men who worked on Mount Algidus when it was a sheep station. Clive’s firm is one of the most respected in New Zealand and he is rightly proud of this project, which stretched the skills and ingenuity of even his experienced team. Finally, there was the interior decorator, London-based Colin Orchard, an old friend of the Smileys who had worked on two of their previous houses in Sydney and who had been part of the team at Colefax and Fowler in the Eighties.
Lucas Allen