Every good design starts with a site, not a floor plan. For Matipo Heights, that meant a steep, north-facing block in Rotorua with a long, uninterrupted view out over the lake, and not much else to work from — no existing structure, no fixed brief beyond making the most of what was there. It's the kind of blank canvas our design team loves, and exactly the kind of project that shows our process at its most honest.

Working with the slope, not against it

A steep site can be treated two ways: levelled and fought, or read and followed. We took the second path. Matipo Heights steps down the contour across three distinct levels — garaging and entry sitting highest at street level, with the main living spaces dropping below to sit closer to the view and the sun. It's a quieter, more considered response than simply building up and hoping the outlook takes care of itself, and it means every level does real work rather than existing purely to bridge a change in height.

A cantilever that earns its place

The upper floor steps out beyond the level below it, held on a single oversized timber column rather than a wall of posts. It's a deliberately spare gesture, doing double duty as a covered outdoor room below and a wide, glazed retreat above. Deep eaves run the length of the roofline, shading the glass through a Rotorua summer and keeping the weather off the deck without a single added awning. Underneath, a warm timber-lined soffit carries the same material inside, so the transition from outdoor room to living space reads as one continuous idea rather than two separate decisions.

Designed to Passivhaus Standard from the outset

This isn't performance dressed up after the fact. Matipo Heights is being designed to Passivhaus Standard from the very first sketch, with full Passive House Certification the intended outcome once the home is built — the level of performance our client asked for from day one. We're working alongside a Passive House Certified Tradesperson through detailed design and into construction to get there, and energy modelling is already underway, tracked and refined at every stage of the project rather than checked once at the end.

Grounded in stone, screened in timber

At street level, a stone-veneer base and chimney breast ground the building visually against the slope — a deliberately heavier material low down, with crisp weatherboard cladding lightening the form as it rises. A vertical timber slat screen wraps the entry and garage frontage, giving the street-facing side privacy and texture without closing the home off. Down at the lower terrace, the palette relaxes again — stone steps down through the lawn to a private deck and hot tub, framed by flax and agave that will only get better with a Bay of Plenty summer behind them.

From sketch to render

What makes Matipo Heights worth sharing isn't just the finished form, it's watching it get there. The concept moved from loose pencil studies, through watercolour massing sketches that tested how light would fall across the cantilever and the stone base, to the fully rendered scheme you see here, day and dusk, empty site to lived-in home. It's the same process behind every one of our 1,000+ commissions since 2002, whether the final building ends up in Tauranga, New Plymouth, or on a lake-view block in Rotorua: understand the site first, then let the design follow.

Considered, not formulaic

There's no template being dropped onto this section. Every decision — where the home sits on the slope, how far the cantilever reaches, where the stone gives way to weatherboard — comes from reading this specific site and this specific view. That's the difference between a house and a piece of architectural design, and it's the same approach we bring to every high-performance home we design, regardless of size or budget.

If you've got a site of your own that feels more like a puzzle than a blank canvas — especially one with a slope, a view, or both — we'd love to hear about it. Give Tony a call or drop him an email directly, he'd love to grab a coffee, bring the sketch pad, and see if there's a connection that could turn your site into your dream home.