This house takes advantage of the extreme topography Wellington is famous for, and could be seen as a precedent for building on the many unused plots of land close to the city centre. The unrestricted views over Wellington harbour and proximity to the Central Business District made it an ideal location to build, but the steep inhospitable section (consistent 45-55 degree slope) offered no building platform to work from. No known housing typology was going to work here, and the brief became to invent one. The design process needed to leave the studio early, and involved collaboration between engineer, builder and architect to work through the site's challenges. The solution was to hang the 4-storey house off a vertical 12metre block wall anchored to the land. "We effectively tipped the house on its side, with exposed vertical foundations towards the cliff, and wrapped the downhill wall with a roof, and this gave opportunity for the architecture to follow; the hallway became a lift, the skylights became view-windows, and the open-plan living through the two middle levels is vertically - not horizontally - connected.

BBC Architects