Follow the Light – Clifftop House by Ponting Fitzgerald Architects

Overlooking Hahei Beach on the Coromandel Peninsula of Aotearoa New Zealand, Clifftop House by Ponting Fitzgerald Architects facilitates experiences of compression and release to make the most of the astounding view. Further privileging the outlook is an interior that recedes into the background, carefully honed to ensure that functionality does not get in the way of a direct connection with nature.

Clifftop House is home to a social and adventurous family with high school-aged children. As such, David Ponting, Director of Ponting Fitzgerald Architects, was briefed with creating a functional family home that engaged with the incredible surrounding views. He was also charged with creating a definitive sense of privacy, as the clifftop site is visible from so many surrounding houses. “The site is looked at by maybe 30 to 40 houses from the other side of the road, the cul-de-sac and up the hill,” David explains. “There was a desire to – without meaning to be rude – turn the back on the neighbourhood.” This gentle defensiveness has been achieved subtly through a generously overhung roof on the deck that shelters and mitigates the sense of being on show. The slight elevation of the house from the public walking track, just three metres away, also clearly defines what is private space, not to be encroached upon. As David puts it, “the architecture composes as a statement of openness and closure, privacy and presentation.”

Overlooking Hahei Beach on the Coromandel Peninsula of Aotearoa New Zealand, Clifftop House by Ponting Fitzgerald Architects facilitates experiences of compression and release to make the most of the astounding view.

Perhaps the best example of this dynamic lies within the experience of travelling through the house, which was influenced by David’s first experience of the property when a 1960s beach house was still erect on the site. “I was completely blown away by the experience of going there for the first time,” says David. He describes entering the then two-storey house at a lower level via a tiny front door and ascending a narrow flight of stairs. “You got this incredible sense of shock when you realise the view,” David recalls. “There was nothing forewarning how incredible it is to be on the upper level of that site. It was a really personal experience. I just wanted to make sure that amazing sensation was experienced by
everyone who went there again.”

In Clifftop House, this experience has been amplified by a three-storey building with a garage level, a mid level with bedrooms, a rumpus room and laundry and a top-level open plan kitchen-living area with an astonishing outlook across the South Pacific Ocean. The concrete garage level is embedded in the site, supporting the two floors above. Entry into the home is via this lower level, “effectively compressing the arrival experience – you’re forced to walk under this two-storey object to get to the front door,” David explains. The angled garage walls lead to a stairwell, a dark vertical tunnel with light emanating from above, drawing you upwards. “When you get to the top, the aperture goes from being a black space through a [relatively narrow] opening into suddenly a lightness in everything. The deprivation of this vertical corridor is very purposeful,” says David. “It’s an incredible colour shock in many respects but it’s a
beautiful one because it’s the natural world [that you are seeing].”

Further privileging the outlook is an interior that recedes into the background, carefully honed to ensure that functionality does not get in the way of a direct connection with nature.

David describes this experience of extreme visual and spatial contrast as “a psychological journey that triggers the senses via the material of concrete [and] the blackness of the wooden finishes – with this gothic idea of the heavens being opened.” The raw concrete exterior of the garage level ties in with the steel and black-stained plywood stairwell to create a sense of solidity and sensory deprivation. In the upper level, where the light and the views of the water are dramatically on show, the cedar ceiling,
oak floors and deck all contribute to a warm and open space, without distracting from the outlook. “The house doesn’t put anything between you and that joy of the natural world,” David explains. “It’s about not creating impediments.”

In the open plan kitchen area, the approach to materiality is no different. David was determined “not to let the functional requirements of the building dominate the experience of being in the building. It’s
a backdrop. The kitchen is such an entertaining space. I regard it as a stage, where someone performs with food and wine and conviviality.” As such, the appliances within the kitchen needed to be aesthetically recessive, while still meeting the demands of family life and entertaining. A Fisher & Paykel Refrigerator Freezer, DishDrawer and CoolDrawer have all been integrated into the kitchen, hiding seamlessly behind the dark timber cabinetry. The minimal, clean lines of the Fisher & Paykel Built-In Oven, Gas and Induction Cooktop and Integrated Rangehood all play an important part in meeting this design specification. These appliances are so adept at integration that “it’s almost as though the social
joy of eating and drinking is magic, something that’s been conjured up,” David says.

On enabling this crucial element of the interior design, he explains that “with Fisher & Paykel products, their capacity for design [is] to naturally continue the recessiveness of the kitchen as a working space and [allow it to be] more a place of beauty and culture, where food happens to magically arrive.” The scullery takes this notion of receding a step further. Cleverly tucked behind a door that at first appears to be a wall, the scullery houses a bench, storage space and a sink, as well as a Fisher & Paykel Built-In Oven, DishDrawer and Refrigerator Freezer. “When you’re entertaining, there’s a natural social vanity, a desire to have the house to be as aesthetically enjoyable as the [surrounding] context,” says David. “It’s such a beautiful world to look out at, it would be a shame to see the functional reality of bowls and knives and chopping boards and bits of onion left over. To not have to worry about that because it was [prepared] before and it’s sitting out the back, it’s theatre in many respects – social theatre.”

With an integrated kitchen as the stage, Clifftop House is an exquisite place for life to play out. Offering the maximum of protection and privacy without placing any barrier between occupants and the landscape beyond, the architecture effortlessly balances these seemingly contradictory imperatives to craft nuanced and meaningful connections.