KEY POINTS:
The clubhouse at the centre of next week's New Zealand Golf Open at Arrowtown has been partially buried in the first stage of an extraordinary subterranean real estate development.
The Hills clubhouse, designed by acclaimed Auckland architect Andrew Patterson for jeweller Michael Hill, has been sunk into a north-facing rise in the ultimate move to go green.
Mr Patterson said the clubhouse design ensured the new low-profile structure integrated with the landscape and ecology of the golf course.
"The clubhouse and golf cart buildings are recessed into the grassy bowl adjacent to the 18th green, making the structures all but invisible unless viewed from its immediate surrounds to the northwest," Mr Patterson said.
"The impression we wanted was that the clubhouse was formed by the same forces that shaped the land."
The major golf competition about to begin has a $1.5 million purse. It starts on Thursday and finishes on December 2 and is being played at Mr Hill's Central Otago property.
In July, it was announced that he had struck a three-year agreement for the Michael Hill New Zealand Open, winning the rights for the event to be played at the new golf course he has built on his 160ha property.
The clubhouse has drawn international attention, nominated for next year's Chicago Athenaeum Awards, one of the world's most coveted prizes.
Mr Patterson said the clubhouse design was not the only unusual feature - the building's location was also unique.
Most golf clubhouses are set some distance from the play, but in what is thought to be a world first, The Hills' clubhouse is on the course.
And if balls land on the clubhouse roof during the event, which could draw 200 million television viewers worldwide, players will have to climb up and take their shots from there.
If viewers have any affinity with The Lord of The Rings and Hobbiton, they will get an extra treat in coming years because more subterranean structures are coming.
Mr Patterson has designed 17 extraordinary semi-underground luxury homes to be built around the 18-hole course. But his designs are far more advanced than the quaint, primitive dugouts of Frodo or Bilbo Baggins.
Three-quarters of each bunker home will be below ground, their roofs covered in turf, pebbles or tussock.
Mr Hill said he wanted each of the 367sq m to 700sq m houses to look as if it had occurred naturally. "My brief was I would not want to see the houses, but sort of stumble on them when going for a walk with the dog."
Mr Patterson's work includes Stratis, the Lighter Quay apartment block on Auckland's waterfront, the Cumulus commercial office block in Parnell, Site 3 historic stables which have been converted to restaurants and offices in St Benedicts St, Newton, and the D-72 refurbishment of offices in Dominion Rd with a woven exterior.
