Inside a Cliffside Home Nestled Into a Mountain Forest (House Tour)

Wellington is renowned for its wild weather and extreme wind. So we wanted to create a house that was really robust on the outside and we wanted the outdoor areas to feel protected. So this is very much the idea of how this sort of cave-like terrace came about. In fact the terrace has a kind of microclimate where it always feels extremely calm even when storms are raging around it. I am Nicholas Stephens from Stephens Lawson Architects and I'm the co-design lead on the Eastbourne house. The house is located in Eastbourne which is on the eastern side of Wellington Harbour in the lower north island of New Zealand. I like to think that this house is part of a tradition of innovative architecture in Wellington which is built in an extreme terrain. We imagined this form of this house almost as if it was a rock that had been shaped by the weather. It's got these subtle curves which sort of round off the edges. We wanted to create a real experience of moving through the house almost a choreography of space as you move through spaces of various sizes and generous volumes. From the road you ascend a ramped driveway and you swing in into the undercroft. At that point you are confronted with an extraordinary artwork by the artist John Reynolds which is a tribute to Wellington's wild weather and its condition of living on the edge. On entering the house you arrive at a foyer and the beginning of a helical stair which winds up through three floors of the house. This is an extraordinary piece of steelwork fabricated on site and it's made of black steel and it has a beautiful timber floor overlaid over the top of it. It's a very elegant way to ascend and you pass a sleeping level on the way with its curvaceous corridors. At the top of the stairs you arrive at the main central living area. It feels calm but uplifting. It feels a little like you've just climbed to a lookout and you're now looking out across the horizon and this is a lofty space, double height, with light pouring in. It has beautiful oak floors and you know a really gorgeous kitchen. And what's interesting about the space is the way that the living area and this vast deck is like one continuous space. The doors open fully and you read it really as one space. The terrace itself is an interesting space in its own right. It's not one of those terraces which sort of hangs out in space and is exposed on all sides. It's a little bit more cave-like. There's sheltered areas for cooking and for dining and it's as if you're in the mouth of a cave looking out. Because of the terrain the building needed to be built from the top down for site access, unlike most buildings which are built from the bottom up. Now as you can imagine, logistically this makes for a far more complex and time-consuming build. In addition, Wellington is built on a fault line so the building is built to a very high seismic standard which means that the foundations are substantial and that the structure is incredibly rigid. The exterior of the house has a robust materiality. It's clad in black glazed terracotta tiles and black aluminium. We saw this as a way of receding back into the darkness of the native bush which surrounds. The interior is in contrast to this, light and airy. We used Forte engineered oak flooring for the floors in the living area, in the staircase and in the hallways and this is a really beautiful floor. We used millboard decking for the outdoor terrace. It's a sustainable alternative to hardwood decking. We're really impressed with the way that the millboard decking can match the oak flooring inside. Warm, it's textured, it's pre-finished, it's incredibly stable, there's beautiful colours and we think it really adds to the atmosphere of this house. My favourite part of the project is how it reimagines what a family home can be. A five-storey structure that is both a sanctuary and a theatre for daily life. I hope and I believe that the family can feel this too. It was a really special experience designing this home. Unusual and difficult sites demand unusual and innovative solutions, both in design and planning, in construction methodology and in materiality and it was wonderful because our clients really embraced this, as did the builders, and the whole experience really was quite wonderful.