Aucklanders love to get away to the Matakana Coast. Now, with milestone transport improvements pending and remote working quite acceptable, new opportunities to live there and enjoy a more relaxed lifestyle are emerging north of Warkworth township.
Warkworth Ridge, a major new residential development by Templeton Group, New Zealand’s largest private property developer, will yield 643 new homes on elevated, 53-hectare, contoured, former farmland.
Jettison any thoughts of those inelegant, unerringly flat subdivisions gridded with scrupulously straight roads you can spot within Auckland, architect Jennifer Hanson says.
“This is a sensitive, master-planned development, shaped by the natural contours of the land,” she says.
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“A revegetated stream, attractive elevated views, multiple parks and a little collection of buildings creating a community hub are going to be big components.”
Hanson is one of the directors of A Studio Architects, which contributed towards planning this $350 million land development.
“The issue with those ‘let’s create as many flat planes as we can’ developments is they don’t respond to the landscape and often don’t sit well in the landscape,” she says.
“Nigel McKenna, who leads Templeton, has a very strong view that people need to be able to feel proud of the environment and the community they’re part of.”
This sensitive, master-planned development will shaped by the natural contours of the land. Photo / Supplied
To that end, Hanson says, people buying Warkworth Ridge sections to build homes have home design guidelines to work with.
These will ensure the end result is a high-quality mixed housing community which inherits some of the casual rural aesthetic the site had before its development.
“The design standards encourage rural forms such as pitched rooves, which can still be built in a really modern, sleek way,” she says.
“Before building, owners submit their preliminary designs and detailed designs to Templeton’s Warkworth Ridge Design Panel so they can check no-one’s going in a wildly misplaced direction.”
Sections vary in size, aspect and contour and while there are some much larger sections even the more modest are all able to accommodate stand-alone homes with double garages. They are priced from $400,000.
The community’s hub, which has been conceived to complement the wider range of retail outlets, specialty stores and municipal facilities in nearby Warkworth, will consist of three buildings around a courtyard.
It will have a general store with a barn aesthetic, a restaurant-eatery and a general-purpose function room, event centre and community space.
People buying Warkworth Ridge sections to build homes will have home design guidelines to work with. Photo / Supplied
This location just north of Warkworth township is currently 45 minutes from Auckland’s CBD, off-peak. It is set to benefit from the well-advanced and much-publicised $1 billion Puhoi-to-Warkworth SH1 motorway extension (which NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi isn’t currently publicising an official completion date for because of Covid effects).
Warkworth Ridge will be linked directly to the Puhoi-to-Warkworth motorway extension by the soon-to-be-completed $27m Matakana Link Road, designed to unlock Warkworth’s existing traffic problems, reduce travel times and ease congestion.
The development sits at the gateway to Matakana Coast’s attractions, including Tāwharanui Regional Park, Omaha Beach, Goat Island, Pakiri and Sandspit Marina. It’s a distance from Matakana’s village market and overlooks the Warkworth Showgrounds’ extensive complex of sports fields, playgrounds and walking tracks.
Anchoring Warkworth Ridge’s southwestern end will be Warkworth’s Aquatic Centre which will focus on teaching people to swim, and is ear-marked for completion by early 2024.
Templeton expects first titles to be issued and construction of the first homes to start in 2023, to align with the anticipated completion of NX2 and the Matakana Link Road.
A display suite at 2 Clayden Road, Warkworth is open by appointment; visit warkworthridge.co.nz. Bayleys agents Anthony Shaw and Joneen Smith are marketing Warkworth Ridge.
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