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.
