Inside New Zealand’s Home of the Year: A Brutalist Beach Bunker скачать в хорошем качестве

Inside New Zealand’s Home of the Year: A Brutalist Beach Bunker

The 2025 Home of the Year overall winner, Bunker House by Chris Tate, blends sculpture and architecture in a daring addition to a very public site. It pushes boundaries of materiality and engineering while staying true to its vision, despite a 14-year design and build process. One can buy real fruit ice cream next door — mixed berry, passionfruit, or banana. There are always kids around — boogie boards under arms, neon-coloured board shorts, and surf-branded everything in tow. The comings and goings of the sea here have always been so hypnotic that even back in the day a local Māori princess would sit on Lion Rock and stare, for hours, at the patterns of the sea as it crashed upon the land. There is a raw beauty here — an exuberance of greenery, dramatic cliff drops, and volcanic sand; a perfect and jagged horizon where, from time to time, the moon comes to hang above the Pacific as if from a single silver thread. Yet this beachfront is not just all Kiwiana idyll of the Linn Lorkin variety; it is a place of dramatic contrasts. The ocean is made of powerful undertows, gnarly currents, and waves in sizes often mythologised by people who claim to have ridden them. The local equivalent of Bondi Rescue was filmed here, although the surf is so dangerous it was hard to know if you were watching reality pap or toying with the unpleasant possibility of televised mortality. There have also been a series of unexplained disappearances of visitors to this secluded beach. These vanishings, with equally mysterious theories about predators or otherworldly forces, contribute to Piha’s ‘edge’, as if fuelled by the loud combustion of the ocean against rock face. This unmissable house by designer Chris Tate seems to perfectly fit those polarities of dissonance and charm. It is conspicuous, yet proportionate. It is luxurious, although it sits beside a busy, public parking lot and a surf lifesaving club. It was much derided by locals during its long construction, but is now constantly photographed and lauded. Read more: https://homemagazine.nz/a-brutalist-p... Architecture: Chris Tate Architecture Interiors: Luxe Design Build: Team Builders Kitchen: Studio Italia #bunker #housedesign #sustainablearchitecture #housetour #beachhouse