Plans for an enormous Wānaka home with ‘cave-like portals’ and subterranean details have been green-lit after a years-long process.

The Environment Court has approved plans for the house, which measures at more than 2,000 sqm.

That’s around half the size of the Wānaka Recreation Centre or New World Three Parks.

Applicant Nature Preservation Trust Ltd purchased the 7.66ha site off Wānaka-Mt Aspiring Road in 2016.

Plans to demolish the 650sqm home on the site and replace it with one more than three times as large were repeatedly turned down until a recent Environment Court ruling gave it the go-ahead.

Local architecture firm Sorted Architecture said the home would “burrow downward”.

They described “cave-like portals” with windows and doors “subtly located in the steep hillside below the above ground part of the residential unit” in application documents.

More than two-thirds of the home would be built below ground level.

In the Environment Court ruling, judge JJ Hassan said the applicant and Queenstown Lakes District Council had come to an agreement after a series of amendments to the plans. 

The home will be just a few kilometres up the road from US billionaire Peter Thiel’s property.

Thiel’s luxury lodge proposal measures around the same size as the recently approved one, and also features some of the same kind of subterranean details. 

After failing to gain resource consent, that application is also on its way to the Environment Court.

Read more: ​​Bid for billionaire’s bolthole heads to court

IMAGE: Supplied