How the Futuro UFO house landed in New Zealand

They’re the designer pre-fab houses with a cult following.

From Finland to Taiwan and outback Australia, the UFO houses have been to almost every continent, but how did New Zealand come to be the home of the Futuro House? And where are they now?

The portable self-contained cabins are designed to be able to be readily transported, which makes them hard to keep track of. However around 10 of around 60 remaining Futuro Cabins landed in New Zealand.

Built the same year that man landed on the moon, the space-aged cabins were designed at a time when anything seemed possible. The distinctive, flying saucer shape embodies the optimism of the mid-century design and the feeling that, in not too many years, we might be holidaying on Mars. Why not?

Futuros landed in New Zealand with the 1974 Commonwealth Games in Christchurch. Photo / Supplied

In 1968 you get the feeling architect Matti Suuronen must have been looking to the skies when he came up with the shape. It was built during the height of the Space Race. It appeared the same year as Stanley Kubrick’s A Space Odyssey topped the cinema box office.

Despite their space-aged looks, the architect says the flying saucer shape is ‘mere coincidence’.

The Finnish designer was given the brief of creating a prefabricated ski chalet for Europe.

The UFO Futuro house of Ohoka is now an award-winning BnB, let out to guests. Photo / Thomas Bywater

According to Suuronen the shape was designed to accommodate the harsh alpine environment, with the perfect aerodynamics to resist high winds and snow load on the roof.

What he delivered was a vision straight out of the Jetsons - but it didn’t really gel with outdoor enthusiasts. There’s something that distracts from skiing about pulling up to a UFO at the end of the day. Despite their versatility and simple concept, they didn’t take off anywhere.

Then the Futuros became prohibitively expensive in the 1970s as did the raw materials to make them.

In the end only 100 were ever built, which made them extremely collectable. Somehow 12 of these ended up in New Zealand, a large portion of which ended up in possession of Nick McQuoid.

Nick McQuoid's childhood obsession with the Futuro Houses has turned into New Zealand's most unique Airbnb. Photo / Supplied

How the UFOs landed in New Zealand

McQuoid says he has owned five of the flying-saucer-like houses, at one time the owner of the largest collections of Futuros in the world.

The New Zealand businessman says bought his first after the 2011 earthquakes.

“The Futuro represented just something really fun and attention-grabbing. I needed a project to get out of a rut,” he says.

Since early childhood, he has had an obsession with attention-grabbing prefabs. As a kid, he’d beg his dad to drive them past them next to the Avon River on the way home.

The saucers landed in Christchurch during the 1974 Commonwealth Games along with a set of moulds from Finland. Two of the saucers were poised either side of the gates of the Queen Elizabeth ll Stadium where the events were being held.

Futuro house collector Nick McQuoid in front of the disassembled gold UFO house from the Christchurch Commonwealth Games. Photo / Thomas Bywater

A canny bit of marketing, New Zealanders were presented the saucers as the ‘home of the future’. Sadly just as they caught the imagination the cost of oil and the cost of Futuros tripled overnight, with the OPEC oil embargo of 1974.

“They’re completely made out of carbon fibre. What was supposed to be cheap wonder material - now means they cost the same as a superyacht.”

The oil crisis spelled the end of the 1960s era of design and ‘plastic fantastic’. It was also the end of the Futuro.

The ‘portable’ were supposed to be affordable, and able to be installed anywhere.

McQuoid says the idea of them being easy to transport also belongs to an overly-optimistic past, when petrol was under 10c a litre.

In 2018 he bought his latest Futuro from a fisherman in Haast. The Futuro was being used as a whitebait hut on the Paringa river.

“It was in one of the most remote areas of New Zealand you can get to.”

“It was probably one of the most traumatic things I’ve ever done.”

“We went up there on a jet boat with battery-powered tools, which we charged on a solar panel.”

The mammoth task in 4 days. Didn’t understand quite hard it would be to dismantle the UFO in a rainforest.

Opened just in time for 2021, The Space-ship-shaped listing recently won an award as New Zealand’s most unique Airbnb 2022.

Being able to helicopter the pods around 4 tonne It’s trying to do something in 2022 that was designed to be doe in 1968 - a lot have things have changed like fuel costs and health and safety.

“You just did it back then”