Every stage earns while the next one builds.
One precinct,
built in four moves.
02
Three sites, read as one address.
Scenic's three sites sit within a short walk of each other. Read together they can carry what no single hotel here can afford alone — one gym, one staff base, one luggage room, one servicing spine — and each building is freed to do the thing it is best placed to do.
The gateway
A triangular brownfields site with a church on it, falling towards the view. Five star, eighty rooms and more, luxury apartments among them, none under forty square metres. Rooftop restaurant and bar, valet arrival off Stanley Street, thermal pools below.
The engine
Scenic's 81 room Heartland Hotel Queenstown holds the site today. Four star plus in its place, carrying the conference capacity, a restaurant at 150 to 200 covers and the back of house for all three hotels. Built in two stages around a trading hotel.
The efficient one
Low grade houses today. A maximisation scheme in their place: three plus to four star, rooms of twenty to twenty four square metres, dual key and interconnecting throughout. Lean public areas, because the precinct supplies the rest.
The gateway site
takes the height.
A triangular brownfields site falling towards the view.
Luxury hotel
The ground floor gives the street a lobby and keeps the servicing behind it.
The first full guest floor. The plate set out at ground repeats here, and it is the one that sets the pattern for everything above.
A typical guest floor. Repetition from here up is what makes the modular pod approach worth the earlier design freeze.
Mid-building. The site narrows as it rises, so the plate loses rooms to the taper without changing the corridor.
The recession plane begins to govern the western edge. Rooms step back rather than reduce in size.
The apartment level. Fewer, larger dwellings where the outlook is best and the plate is at its narrowest.
The rooftop is the reason the gateway site takes the height. Restaurant, bar and terrace, open to the precinct and the town, not only to guests.
The site falls, so the first level below the street is not a basement. Thermal pools and wellness open to the lower ground.
Everything the precinct needs and no guest sees. Parking, plant, deliveries and the staff base sit at the bottom of the fall.
Quiet outside, warm inside.
A dark, deeply modelled facade that recedes against the schist and beech line, opened by full-height glazing where the view is worth taking. Interiors turn warm — timber, wool, stone underfoot — so the contrast is felt at the door. The quality benchmark is the Roki Collection, and the thermal level takes its cue from Hotel The Mitsui Kyoto.
Stone and copper outside,
timber within reach.
Four materials carry the building. Three sit outside and weather — stone quarried in the district, copper that darkens with age, concrete left as struck. The fourth is what a guest touches.
Construction Methodology
& Delivery Strategy
Building at scale in Queenstown is constrained by labour, weather and access. The proposed structural methodology answers all three, prioritising programme certainty, labour efficiency, build quality and long-term operational performance.
Preliminary engineering supports a hybrid solution: robust precast concrete at the lower levels, a fast and flexible steel-framed superstructure above.
The lower basement and ground floor are precast concrete, incorporating both retaining and waterproofing functions. Durable enough for the site’s geotechnical and groundwater conditions, and it removes most in-situ concrete work.
Factory manufacture improves quality control, cuts site labour and adds programme certainty. Installing the basement and podium early establishes weather-tight zones sooner, reducing risk through the Queenstown winter.
Above the podium, a steel eccentrically braced frame. It performs strongly in seismic terms while allowing efficient floor plates and flexibility for future operational requirements.
Steel is fabricated off site and assembled quickly, and can be manufactured concurrently with basement construction — taking work off the critical path. The lighter structure also reduces foundation loads, saving cost in both structure and substructure.
The structural system was chosen to maximise prefabrication. Hotel accommodation floors repeat, which suits prefabricated bathroom pods and other manufactured components.
Pods are built off site in factory conditions while structural works proceed, improving quality assurance, reducing trade coordination and minimising the defects typical of wet-area construction.
Once the frame is erected, pods install rapidly, letting services, fit-out and façade trades run concurrently. That reduces reliance on scarce local labour in a constrained market.
A contemporary, proven approach to hotel delivery that balances durability, resilience and construction efficiency while mitigating the programme and labour challenges common to the Queenstown market.
The location is the destination
The fall across the site lets arrival, guest floors and the thermal level stack without fighting each other. Public arrival to the rooftop is separated from guest arrival at the street, so the restaurant can trade hard without crossing the hotel lobby.
The engine of
the precinct.
Built in two stages around a trading hotel, and carrying the conference, dining and back of house for all three.
Conference, restaurant, back of house
The form follows the fall.
The building steps with the site contours rather than cutting them flat. That keeps the earthworks down, gives the upper rooms a longer view, and lets the vehicle entry meet Melbourne Street at grade.
Staging strategy
The corner carpark is undeveloped, so stage 1 can be built while Heartland keeps trading. Stage 4 takes the balance of the site once the precinct can absorb the rooms.
The efficient one.
Low grade houses today, and nothing on the site worth keeping. That is the freedom in it. One plate is drawn once and built [ ] times, the public rooms stay lean because the precinct already carries them, and every room still holds daylight and an outlook.
Rooms of 20 to 24 square metres
Three plates, and the same core on all of them.
Parking and servicing at the bottom, the public rooms at the podium, and a guest floor that repeats to the setback. The core sits in one position throughout.
The form turns every room away from the neighbour and towards the view, and they let the plate repeat around a single core.
Room typologies
Every room across the precinct is built from the same bathroom pod and the same corridor position. What changes is the footprint around it, and the tier of the finish inside.
Two room sizes,
one bay dimension.
The gateway site carries the largest rooms in the precinct, none of them under forty square metres. The standard room runs long and narrow off the corridor; the apartment doubles it, taking a second bay for a queen bedroom and a living room.
The top of the building, and six per cent of the keys.
The penthouses run the width of the plate and open onto a terrace with its own outdoor bath. Three bedrooms sit in a row behind the living room, each splitable and each with its own bathroom.
Same library,
a different tier.
The other two sites work from smaller footprints. Both are drawn as mirrored pairs — a splitable king beside a twin — so the operator can let a family as one booking or two, and re-cut the mix by season.
One detail set across three buildings. The pair is drawn once and built many times over, which is what makes the earlier design freeze worth taking.
Who does the work,
and where they have done it before.
Figure & Ground is a design-led architectural design studio in central Christchurch. These five carry the project from concept to completion.
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Shared from concept,
not handed over at the end.
Three sites, four stages and a hotel that keeps trading through two of them. That only works if the interior designers, the contractor and Scenic’s own team are drawing on the same model as the base build is being set out.
Interiors — Kesseler Designs and Twinfold Design
Interiors led by Scenic’s existing partners, with Figure & Ground holding the base build and the interface between them. One drawing set, one model, shared from concept.
Early contractor involvement
The contractor and the module fabricator are in the room from concept, pricing the scheme as it is drawn. Buildability and cost advice lands while it can still change the design rather than after consent.
With Scenic’s team
Operations, sales and the ownership group review at the end of each stage, so the room mix, the back of house and the trading plan are agreed before documentation begins.
On the ground in Queenstown
Christchurch to Queenstown is a one hour flight. Site attendance as required per month through construction.
Benchmarked against the ROKI Collection Hotel.
Construction costs have been benchmarked against the recently completed ROKI Collection Hotel in Queenstown, which provides a relevant precedent due to its comparable luxury positioning, high-quality material palette, extensive guest amenities, and similarly constrained hillside site requiring significant earthworks and retaining structures. The ROKI development, a 15-suite ultra-luxury hotel completed in 2025, reportedly delivered a construction value of approximately $46 million and involved substantial excavation, retaining works, and a premium architectural specification.
While construction cost escalation since 2025 would ordinarily suggest a higher rate is applicable today, market feedback indicates that aspects of the ROKI construction methodology were relatively inefficient, contributing to an elevated overall construction cost. In particular, the constrained site logistics, extensive temporary works requirements, and bespoke nature of the development are understood to have increased construction expenditure beyond what would typically be expected for a project of this scale.
The proposed 24–28 Stanley Street development is anticipated to achieve greater construction efficiencies through a more rationalised structural and construction methodology, improved buildability, and a larger number of guest keys relative to the shared amenity provision. While maintaining a similar premium level of finish and guest experience, the increased scale of the development allows fixed amenity, operational and back-of-house areas to be distributed across a larger accommodation offering, improving overall efficiency.
Accordingly, the adopted construction rate per square metre is slightly lower than the equivalent benchmark rate derived from the ROKI Collection Hotel. This reflects the anticipated economies of scale, more efficient construction sequencing, and improved buildability of the proposed development. These efficiencies are expected to largely offset the effects of construction cost inflation since 2025, resulting in a construction rate that is considered both realistic and appropriate for a luxury hotel development of this scale and specification.
Of estimated construction cost, exclusive of GST. The competition fee of fifteen thousand dollars plus GST is excluded from every calculation on this page.
Fee follows the construction cost rather than a lump sum agreed against an area that has not been settled. The stage breakdown is set out at page 41 ↗
Of estimated construction cost, exclusive of GST. Set against the benchmarked rate at page 40 ↗