My name's David Ponting. I'm an architect and director at Ponting Fitzgerald Architects
and I was the design lead on the Clifftop House.
The Clifftop House is built in Hahei, which is a coastal holiday home community pretty much,
on the Coromandel of New Zealand. It's beautiful wide open bay looking out to the Mercury Islands.
The clients came to us to create a wide open space that would engage with this incredible outlook.
An important part of the brief was to make sure that the family could have privacy
on the property because they're effectively at the end of a valley. It's an unusual topography
where they sit up on a ledge that a lot of other houses look at, so we had to consider
the duality of the program; one to make the most of these outstanding views, the second
to ensure that everyone wasn't looking at them from behind while they were trying to see the sea.
Upon arrival, you're channeled into a front arrival space which sits under
the overhang of the upper floor box and this, this is a purposeful move to
restrict an understanding of where you are, remove you from the context and lead you
through a descriptive space that has as little information as possible. It's a it's a two-storey,
black vertical volume. The skylight above allows light to wash down, creates a sense of space but
every, every understanding of where you are in the Coromandel is taken away. You move up
through a mid-level landing which accesses the children's bedroom level and then head up again
to the top floor and from that moment on the top floor, you're, you emerge out into what is
effectively a large covered deck. That really is the the reason for this site being built on, it's
a remarkable space and that sensation that you're not so much in a house but you're inhabiting a
cliff top on a social platform, that's really the main design driver for the whole work.
With the kitchen space, which is obviously vital to the living area working, we didn't
want it to dominate and express itself as this glossy fabrication of residential living. They
wanted to feel more relaxed than that, so to use dark American oak and express the grain,
that allowed us to let this big space just sit back into the pocket a little bit and therefore
the environment dominates more than the elements of the building itself. The way we think about
kitchens is to treat them as furniture elements; built in cabinetry that happens to have function.
The appliance choices needed to be considered very carefully. We didn't want
the objects popping off this beautiful black oak wall,
so Fisher and Paykel have put a bit of effort into making sure their products are discreet and
they sit back and allow the architecture to talk ahead of the elements within the architecture.
Aside of the master bedroom, which has its own sub layer of filtering light,
with a cedar sliding screen that can really shut down the awareness of a bedroom,
tucked at one end, at the western end, or it can be opened up to make the most of the view.
In line with the coastal location, the colour of sand sits intends to dominate the decisions
that are made for integrating and so cedar, with a soft sandy tone was brought into play.
It evokes driftwood and that's that's what you find here, so it's always nice
to build buildings out of what you'd expect to discover if you went for a wander down the beach
and along with that is natural concrete. Once again, it's made of sand. There just simply
the expression of the rough board form finish on the concrete was, it was enough to impart
a character to the building without trying too hard. The in-situ concrete walls were
used to hold the the natural hillside back. We were, we were digging into the face of the
cliff to some degree on the on the south side and as we were burying ourselves into the ground,
it's just, it's so nice to express the mass of that site where we've encroached it.
I think this house plays with a connection to nature and on one hand,
it takes nature away from you by the way you are, you're channeled through such a dark space
and I think that's been unexpected, but by having that restriction, that removal of your awareness
of the sea and the sky and the trees, when you do come to the place where you re-engage,
the the experience is amplified significantly
and in that regard, for the the purpose of the building to embrace the bay is more apparent.
Strangely enough, i really enjoy the view from down on the beach
where really all you recognise is a canopy and that canopy is
quite discreet. It doesn't show itself to the wider community in a way that
speaks of a large home being there. It's a gentle imposition, a subtle imposition. At the same time,
it creates a very large space to look out from and I think that's a nice balance to have achieved.