1The Kawarau Falls Station Development began as an ambitious mixed-use project on Queenstown’s picturesque Kelvin Peninsula. Today, it is a successful lakefront resort largely managed by Hilton Hotels. While many contributors to the project have come and gone, Holmes Consulting has been the constant, taking a strong lead on the project as it moved through its stages.

2Initially, the site required extensive civil works before construction on the hotel and residential properties could begin. More than 355,000 square metres of earth were removed from the site – roughly equivalent to 135 Olympic size swimming pools full of dirt dug up and carted out. Stage 1 alone had a value of $15m for the earthworks and infrastructure, excluding pipes to the buildings. The quartzy schist at the site was so hard it wore out three of the large ‘rockbreakers’ used by the civil engineers. The site itself was extremely tight on space, so interactions between retaining structures, services, roading and so on had to be considered: our designs worked within those constraints to maximise the efficiency of the interactions.