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 search | save | share at trendsideas.com 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