Wānaka · since 2011
An architect and a master builder, one office.
Rae & Thorburn is a custom home builder in Wānaka. An architect and a master builder, one office, one workshop, and one house at a time, built within an hour of the lake.
Two trades, one office
An architect and a master builder who met on the repair of a stone woolshed and have shared a desk since. The drawing and the building are never handed between firms, because there is only one.
Isla Rae
Architect · b. Dunedin, 1979
Isla trained at Victoria University of Wellington and spent five years in a Copenhagen practice drawing houses for a light she found too soft. She came home in 2010 for a light that is not.
She draws every house in the studio herself, by hand first, and refuses a site she has not walked at least twice: once in summer, once after snow.
- Registered
- NZRAB 2008
- Trained
- Wellington, Copenhagen
- Draws
- Every house, by hand first
Callum Thorburn
Master builder · b. Cromwell, 1976
Callum apprenticed as a joiner at sixteen with his father's firm in Alexandra and has laid Central Otago schist for twenty-eight winters. He runs the Luggate workshop, where every door, drawer and window frame on a Rae & Thorburn house is made.
He is the reason the studio builds slowly. He will not hand over a house with a drawer that sticks.
- Licensed
- LBP, Site 3 and Carpentry
- Workshop
- Luggate, since 2015
- Trade
- Joiner, stonemason
Fifteen years
Six houses, one rule about distance, and a workshop that made every door.
- 2011
Isla Rae and Callum Thorburn meet on the repair of a stone woolshed at Hāwea Flat. The studio is founded that winter in a shed on Ballantyne Road.
- 2013
Maungawera House, the first. A farm cottage's footprint retraced in schist and larch.
- 2015
The joinery workshop opens in Luggate. The studio decides to build only within an hour's drive of Wānaka, and has not broken the rule since.
- 2017
Pisa House. First use of the thin blackened-steel roof plane that has carried every house since.
- 2019
Cardrona House. The studio moves to Brownston Street, above the old bakery.
- 2021
Tarras House, on the Bendigo terraces. The first house to be triple-glazed throughout.
- 2024
Dingle Burn House, reached by the lake road. The sixth house, and the one you walk through on this page.
- 2026
Fifteen years. Two houses under way, one in the drawing.
Office
12 Brownston StreetWānaka 9305
Otago, Aotearoa New Zealand
Hours
- Monday to Friday
- 8.30 – 5.00
- Saturday
- By appointment
- Sunday
- Closed
Why only here
Central Otago · 44.6° S
Central Otago is the driest, coldest and hottest region in the country, sometimes in the same week. The light is high and hard and the shadows are long. Schist splits along its grain. Larch chars evenly. Nothing forgives a bad detail.
We build only within an hour of the lake because that is the ground we know: where the frost sits, where the nor'wester crosses, where the schist comes up clean. A house drawn for this light does not belong anywhere else, and we would rather build fewer houses than build one somewhere we cannot read.