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A Queenstowner who developed the Speargrass Flat subdivision where council’s allowed an allegedly over-height building says it makes "a nonsense" of it.
Architect Fred van Brandenburg’s commenting on a Mountain Scene story last week, where a former planning hearings commissioner says bunds in this subdivision were designed to hide one-storey buildings, "but the council’s allowed, effectively, a one-storey building on top of a bund".
Van Brandenburg says: "The intention was to have single-storey houses tucked in behind the mounds, such that they couldn’t overlook the mounds.
"I specifically [allowed] over-sized building platforms so a single-storey house could spread out."
He notes the mounds were "hugely controversial" at the time, "but now they’re commonplace".
"That was the prototype for [the nearby] Hawthorn [subdivision], which was to come afterwards."
Allowing a quasi two-storey building is "against the spirit of the subdivision, or indeed, perhaps, even the condition of the subdivision", he says.
"It makes a nonsense of the intention of the original subdivision."
