Mt Cardrona Station Special Zone was given its final tick of approval by the Queenstown Lakes District Council on Thursday and will now become part of the district plan.
Developer Chris Morton, of Auckland, told the Otago Daily Times he was keen to get under way, and while initially not too keen to say when construction work would start, suggested it was likely to be next year.
Mr Morton described the development as containing a mix of the elements to be found in Arrowtown and at the Millbrook resort.
"We’re trying to create a bigger village with a wider range of building types that would reflect more Arrowtown than Millbrook, which is just predominantly a resort."
Detailed design work was under way, and he was discussing the hotel with prospective hotel operators and car parking with Real Journeys, which owns the skifield.
He believed it was "probably too late now" for the car park to be ready for this ski season.
Mr Morton said the Cardrona skifield was easily the biggest in the South in terms of skier numbers. It continued to grow and was extending into summer activities, as well.
That meant a long-talked about gondola from the valley floor to the top of the mountain was still "very much a possibility," he said.
"The cardrona alpine resort has got more than 40 people working up there during the summer and as far as we are aware they have had a very busy summer.
"If you’ve got activity in the summer and the winter then it’s going to make [a gondola] a lot more viable.
"No-one knows quite yet when, but if it’s going to be anywhere, it’s going to most likely be there [at Cardrona] just because of the size of their operation."
Mr Morton said he had been coming south "a lot" since the mid 1990s, was a skier and had climbed Mt Aspiring a couple of times.
He has been a property developer since the early 1990s and was involved with a 600-lot development at Omaha.
