Living on the edge, literally: homes perched on cliffs
Living on the edge, literally: homes perched on cliffs
Seattle
NOT every house built on a cliff has stayed on a cliff. So how do homeowners and architects take on this challenge - one that is rewarded with glorious, unobstructed ocean vistas, but also full of potential problems - and still sleep well?
Building a home attached to a sheer wall of rock means balancing aesthetic temptations with the realities of exposure, accessibility, zoning issues and design. Jaime Bartolome Yllera, co-founder of GilBartolome Architects, says that the danger is part of the draw.
"It's in some sense dangerous, but you can safely experience it," he said. "Engineering goes a long way."
His firm won the bid to build the House on the Cliff in Salobrena, on Spain's Costa Tropical, with a design that Bartolome calls a "cave model", cut like a triangular bite into the side of an incline, in this case at a 42-degree grade.
Bartolome fabricated micropiles that dig 18 metres deep into the ground and drilled anchors horizontally 18 metres into the rock.
"For that house to fall into the sea, the whole mountain would have to go into the sea," he said.
The construction crew started by excavating earth to make a vertical retaining wall. Whereas houses on level land are built from the foundation up, houses in the cave model are built from the retaining wall downward: Other floors are added below it, like building a set of stairs from the second floor down.
Though houses built this way can incur additional construction costs, Bartolome said they were able to build the 2,400-square-foot House on the Cliff for about US$200 per square foot, including the retaining wall and the bespoke furniture, for a total construction cost around US$480,000.
To take on this challenge as a homeowner, Bartolome said: "You have to have energy. You get all sorts of challenges, so to be worth it for the client, someone really has to have the vision."
The owners of the home, Sandra and Jaime Vecino, had a vision from the first time they saw the property, riding past it on his father's boat. They were living in Madrid, but Vecino had always summered with his family in the area, hoping he'd find a place there to build a house of his own.
While her husband pointed towards the property, Sandra Vecino asked: "How would you build a house there?" - a question that was echoed by the rest of the family. They found out the answer after they purchased the land, considered four designs and chose the most unusual one, from GilBartolome Architects.
"I wasn't sure, of course. When we saw that house I said, 'My God, this is not going to fall, really?' " she said. "I was scared."
They began to build in 2012, before they had children, and for four years spent summers and offseason weekends there. Their full-time house is just five minutes from the beach, but she says it's not the same as life on the cliff.
"It's as if you're far away from everything, in a bubble, in your own world," she said. "It's magic. It's like the sea is just for you because it's not just a bit of it, it's an immensity. The sky as well. It's everything."
They enjoyed the isolation when they wanted to have loud parties. After having three young children, though, the family decided to use the very non-childproof house just for weekends and rent it as a vacation home for about US$600 a night in the summer and about US$350 in winter, so others can experience it.
The House on the Cliff is striking, but it has competition. Laertis-Antonios Ando Vassiliou, principal architect and director of LAAV Architects, who grew up with a view of the sea in Greece, creates designs for even more daring projects to fit the kind of clientele who might like to live on the edge."I think you need to be a little bit of a daredevil," he said.
Potential buyers have tracked him down for his designs, such as the Casa Brutale concept, renderings of which went viral in 2015 - and for good reason: it's a home that doesn't sit on a cliff but in it, like a drawer in a dresser, with a pool for a ceiling and glass windows flush with the rock face.
Cliff houses don't always have to be such grand affairs. Marialena Hatzigeorgiou and her husband, Daniel Braig, who live in Virginia, just finished their first summer in their new cliff house, one of two simple houses they planned for the future of their two sons, each about 800 square feet and costing about US$200 to US$300 per square foot to build. They built on the Greek island of Skopelos, on property that had been in her family for decades, but used to be home only to grapes, olive trees and hens.
"They're not really big houses, but they're just perfect," Hatzigeorgiou said. "The view is just breathtaking. It would make you stop doing whatever you're doing to just sit there and look at the water."
They still met challenges. To get permission to pave an access road, they had to go to court and show World War II-era photos of a mule path that proved the area had been used for entrance even back then. When they built the house in 2018, they chose to forgo testing the cliff, because the family had owned the property for so long and not seen any shifting, even after pouring a foundation and basement back in 2012.
"There is a house just a couple of corners around us, and we feel that if it's doing well, we are doing OK," Hatzigeorgiou said, adding that they routed rainwater with erosion in mind, would insure the house soon and will get it tested if they see any changes.
"For the time being, I'm not really worried about it." NYTIMES
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