The Black House | Dualchas Architects

This coastal house, recently featured in the Telegraph, is built in a prominent location, being very visible from approaching ferries and the pier.

Nestled within a wooded area, with a flat plateau at the top which overlooks a steep rock face sloping down to meet the shore, it’s a truly unique space.

It has also recently won “Best New House” and “Best Building” at the 2018 IAA Awards.

This coastal house, recently featured in the Telegraph, is built in a prominent location, being very visible from approaching ferries and the pier.

Nestled within a wooded area, with a flat plateau at the top which overlooks a steep rock face sloping down to meet the shore, it’s a truly unique space.

It has also recently won “Best New House” and “Best Building” at the 2018 IAA Awards.

The obvious and most accessible place for house building would have been the flat plateau at the top of the site, which the seller had cleared with this intention. The view is beautiful from here but felt removed from the shore and so felt unworthy of a luxury home construction.

A goal we had with this project was to control the drama of the site, as well as to exploit the view. This allowed us to create an intimate relationship with the shore and the rocky landscape. Our approach was to drop a two-storey box into a natural hollow in the bay.

When approached from behind, the house appears as a modest single-storey black gable. From the front, however, a two-storey glazed gable cantilevers out dramatically over the rocky foreshore. The dark colour pallet helps the property look at home within the landscape and fantastic environment in which it sits.

We carried the idea of control and drama throughout the entire designing and building process, applying it both exterior and interior to create our client’s dream home.

As you descend the staircase, the view through the frameless glazed gable dominates the main living space. The house is filled with books, art and objects which creates a real sense of home, without ever feeling cluttered. The end result is quite sculptural.

The entrance lobby is narrow and unremarkable, but from there you enter a double-height library/stairwell which is lit from above. The view from here is not yet visible, but the drama of the light from above and the verticality gives you a sense of the hidden volume of the building.