Trends New Zealand Trends Volume 32 No 4 New Zealand | Page 20
Previous pages: A grey base level recedes from
sight while long cantilevered wings nose out
amongst protected trees in this contemporary,
high-spec and robust home by O’Neil Architecture.
The house is comprised of two cantilevered wings
in a loose ‘T’ shape. The shorter of the two wings,
home to secondary bedrooms, is in the foreground
here, with the longer section behind running
parallel to the coastline. The design not only
sets the house on high to optimise views, it also
minimises contact with the land, avoiding national
archeological sites and the roots of protected trees.
Sometimes with great architecture, it
can be almost as much about what you
don’t see as what you do. Here, the owners
had bought a spectacular, if remote, cliffside property and asked designer Darren
O’Neil to shape a house to match the site
– but there were constraints to overcome.
“I had designed another house for the
couple many years ago and so they asked
me to undertake this project – a modern,
highly sustainable home on an isolated
site,” says O’Neil. “However, the idyllic
position also included important national
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archeological sites and to complicate things
further, protected pohutakawa trees were
threaded through the site. All this together
meant the design had to make as light an
impact on the land as was possible.”
O’Neil actually came up with sketches
for the house on the back of a napkin in
a matter of minutes. However, while the
form of the home is uncomplicated to
the eye, it required extensive behind-thescenes engineering to make it all work.
“To minimise impact on the land and
to avoid so much as touching a single