A hotel on the bend of the river, built after the city fell down.
Wintercape is a five-star hotel of one hundred and fourteen rooms on the Ōtākaro Avon, four minutes from Hagley Park on foot. The Norwester Room, the Bealey Bar, the Snowline Spa, and a gaming lounge for guests aged twenty and over.
A few mornings each winter the snow lies right along the front ranges — Torlesse, the Big Ben, the Craigieburns — in one unbroken line above the plains. Canterbury runholders called that sight the winter cape. From the eighth floor you can see it, on the mornings it happens.
A casino hotel that is a hotel almost all of the time.
This section of Cambridge Terrace was a car park for five years. The building that stood here before February 2011 came down in the weeks after it, along with most of the block, and the site sat behind a wire fence until 2014. Wintercape opened on 18 November 2016 — nine floors of laminated timber and steel on lead-rubber bearings, faced in Ōamaru stone salvaged from three buildings that did not survive.
The stone is the part guests notice. It is soft, cream-coloured limestone, quarried in North Otago since the 1860s, and if you look along the Cambridge Terrace elevation you can see where the blocks came from different walls: the courses do not quite match, and we did not make them. The mason who set them is named on a brass plate inside the Cambridge Terrace door, which is the sort of thing this city does now.
Inside there are one hundred and fourteen rooms in six categories, a restaurant of eighty-two covers, a bar, a spa with a twenty-metre pool, five event rooms, and on level one a licensed gaming lounge called the Cape Room. That last one is the reason we describe ourselves as a casino hotel, and we would rather be plain about it than coy.
It is one room on one floor. You could stay four nights and never find it, and a good many guests do exactly that.
The gaming lounge runs under the Gambling Act 2003 and is inspected accordingly. It is open to guests and to the public aged twenty and over, from eleven in the morning until late, and it closes at the hour printed on the door. Everything else in the building is open to everyone.
What we are actually good at is the ordinary part. Someone is on the front desk at four in the morning. The kitchen will make you eggs at that hour if you ask and are prepared to wait a bit. The heating works, which in a Christchurch winter is not nothing, and every room has a wool throw made in Ashburton, ninety minutes south, because the southerly gets in regardless.
The elevation
Nine floors on Cambridge Terrace, faced in Ōamaru limestone taken from three buildings that came down after February 2011.
The stone
The courses do not quite match, because the blocks came off different walls. We left it that way. The mason is named on a plate inside the door.
The frame
Laminated timber and steel on lead-rubber bearings. In a decent shake the building is designed to move about 300 mm and stay standing.
02What is hereSix things, nine floors
01 / Rooms
Rooms & Suites
One hundred and fourteen keys in six categories, from a 27 m² Terrace Room to the 128 m² Torlesse Apartment on nine. Rates from NZ$289 a night.
Eighty-two covers on the ground floor with the river on one side. Canterbury produce, a menu rewritten every Wednesday, dinner every night but two a year.
Our gaming lounge on level one: 38 machines, eleven tables and the Torlesse Salon behind it. Adults aged 20 and over, photo identification at the door.
Six packages that put nights together with dinner, the spa, the Alps train or an evening in the Cape Room. None of them require you to gamble to get the value.
Named for the wind that comes down off the Alps and across the plains and makes everybody in this city irritable for two days at a stretch. Eighty-two covers along the river elevation, with the willows outside the glass and the tram going past every eleven minutes until six.
Dinner runs from 5.30pm to 9.30pm, seven nights. Breakfast is served here from 6.30am, and it is the good sort: eggs cooked to order, not a warming tray. The kitchen rewrites the menu every Wednesday and prints it that afternoon, so the card in your room may be a day behind.
Most of what arrives comes from inside the province: Canterbury lamb from the Ashburton lakes country, Akaroa salmon, whitebait from the Coast in September and October when it runs, hogget and merino from the high country stations, and stone fruit out of Central Otago for about six weeks each summer. Bluff oysters from March, while the season holds.
The gaming lounge, 520 m² on level one, reached from the lobby by one flight of stairs or the lift. It holds 38 gaming machines and eleven tables — five blackjack, two roulette, one baccarat and three poker — and behind a door that is usually shut, the Torlesse Salon with four higher-limit tables.
Entry is for adults aged twenty and over. We check photo identification at the door, every time, including for people we know. The dress is smart casual: no high-visibility clothing and no work boots, which is a rule about the floor covering rather than about you.
There is no cash machine in the Cape Room, and none in the corridor outside it. The nearest is in the main lobby, sixty-odd metres away, and you have to walk past a member of staff to get to it. That arrangement is deliberate and it is not going to change.
Five treatment rooms, two of them doubles, around a twenty-metre lap pool held at 28°C. There is a dry sauna, a steam room, and a plunge pool at 11°C which people use once on purpose and then think about for a while.
Treatments run from a 25-minute neck and shoulder at NZ$89 to the two-hour Nor'west Ritual at NZ$340, which uses oil pressed from Canterbury-grown rosehip about forty minutes north of here. Book a day ahead between June and September; the Saturday afternoons go first and they go early.
Treatments are the only part of the spa that is charged for. Guests staying in the hotel use the pool, the sauna, the steam room and the gym at no charge, and the pool opens an hour before the rest of it for people who swim before work.
The Braid Room takes the width of the level-three floorplate: 220 seated at rounds, 300 standing, with its own lift and a service entrance off Gloucester Street so a wedding and a conference can be in the building on the same afternoon without ever meeting each other.
Below it, the Cranmer Room seats 88, the Riverside Studio 44 with the windows onto the water, the Sumner Room 40, and the Lyttelton Boardroom sixteen around one table cut from a single macrocarpa that came out of Hagley Park after the 2013 storms.
We do about fifty-five weddings a year. We will tell you honestly when a date is a poor one — the second half of August is cheap for a reason, and the Riverside Studio is not the room for a nor'wester day, because you can hear it.
Thirty-eight of them on floors three to six, facing the courtyard and the block behind. The quiet side of the building, and the reason people who fly in on the early flight book them. Queen bed, walk-in shower, a desk that is a desk.
Thirty-four rooms along the Cambridge Terrace face, looking straight down into the willows and the punts. King bed, bath and shower, and a window seat deep enough to sit in properly, which is what these are actually booked for.
Twenty-one corner rooms on the upper floors with the park in the west window and, on a clear morning, the Alps behind it. Slightly larger, slightly better lit, and the only standard rooms with a bath under a window.
Thirteen suites with the sitting room separated from the bed by a solid wall and a door, not a screen. Sofa bed for a third guest. Six of the thirteen connect to a Terrace Room, which is how families end up in them.
Six corner suites on seven and eight, two aspects each: the river north, the park west. Dressing room, freestanding bath in the window, and a table for four if you would rather eat upstairs, which in a Christchurch July is a defensible position.
Two of them, the whole of the ninth floor between them, reached by a keyed lift. Two bedrooms, a kitchen that works, a twelve-metre terrace, and the view of the front ranges that gave the hotel its name. Minimum two nights.
Staffed 7am to 10pm; after that the night manager does what he can, and can usually do more than you would expect. The tram stop is forty metres from the door and the loop takes about twenty-five minutes end to end.
Four minutes to the park, six to the square.
Cambridge Terrace runs along the inside of the river loop, which puts almost all of central Christchurch inside a fifteen-minute walk. Hagley Park is four minutes west; the Botanic Gardens, which are inside the park and are the best free thing in the city, are seven. Cathedral Square is six minutes north-east. The Canterbury Museum is eight, the Art Gallery five, Riverside Market three, and the Margaret Mahy playground, which is enormous and full of other people's children, is nine.
The flat ground is the point. Christchurch is the one New Zealand city you can see properly on foot or on a hired bike, and the concierge keeps eight of them. The river path runs from here past the hospital and out through the park; go the other way and you reach the Margins and the new library in about twelve minutes.
Further out, the peninsula does the heavy lifting. Lyttelton is seventeen minutes through the tunnel, and worth an evening for the pubs alone. Sumner beach is twenty-two minutes east; Godley Head above it has the wartime gun emplacements and a track along the cliff that is genuinely alarming in the right wind. Akaroa, the French one, is an hour and twenty-five minutes and should be a whole day.
Inland is where the province gets serious. Mt Hutt is an hour and twenty for the ski field between June and October. The Waipara valley is fifty minutes north and pours pinot gris and riesling that punch a long way above the price. Arthur's Pass is an hour and fifty by road, or four and a half hours by the TranzAlpine train, which leaves the station twelve minutes from this door at 8.15am and is the only train journey in the country people take for its own sake.
Hagley Park — 4 min
The front ranges in winter
Botanic Gardens — 7 min
Sumner and Godley Head — 22 min
The braided rivers
The Ōtākaro Avon, below the window
3 min walkRiverside Market and the lanes behind it
4 min walkHagley Park, at the Armagh Street gate
5 min walkChristchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū
6 min walkCathedral Square and the tram loop
7 min walkThe Botanic Gardens and the Conservatory
8 min walkCanterbury Museum and the Arts Centre
12 min driveChristchurch Railway Station — the TranzAlpine, 8.15am
17 min driveLyttelton, through the road tunnel
20 min driveChristchurch Airport, 12 km north-west
22 min driveSumner beach and Godley Head
50 min driveWaipara Valley wineries
1 h 25 driveAkaroa and the outer harbour
06Host responsibilityGambling Act 2003, s.308
In the Cape Room
Six wall clocks, all of them visible from every table, and all of them correct because a duty host checks them against the phone at the start of each shift and writes down that he did.
We would rather you had a good evening than a long one.
The Cape Room closes at two on weeknights and three on Friday and Saturday, and it closes on time. The last hand is called; it is not extended because the room is busy. A duty host walks the floor every half hour and logs it, whether or not anything happened, and those logs are kept for two years.
There are no cash machines on the gaming floor or in the corridor leading to it, no clocks are hidden, and no drinks are served free of charge at a machine or a table. Windows on the river side of the room are not blacked out, which means you can tell from inside whether it has got dark, and that is on purpose.
If you want to exclude yourself from the gaming lounge, you can do it at reception or by post, in writing and in confidence, for a minimum of two years. We do not ask why, we do not record a reason, and nothing about it appears on your hotel account or in any booking record. Staff who work in or near the Cape Room complete host responsibility training in their first fortnight and again every February.
Reception is staffed around the clock. Anything sent overnight is answered before ten the next morning; anything sent during the day usually comes back inside a couple of hours.
The gaming lounge at Wintercape is reserved for adults aged 20 and over, in line with New Zealand law. Please confirm your age before continuing.
Gaming at Wintercape is available on the premises only. There is no remote or interactive service of any kind. Gambling Helpline 0800 654 655 — free, 24 hours.
Access restricted
This site is for adults aged 20 and over.
Access to this website is restricted to visitors aged 20 and over.
If you need to speak to someone about gambling, the Gambling Helpline is free on 0800 654 655, 24 hours a day. Need to Talk? — call or text 1737.
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