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Bill Holden says the Tairua project embodied his ethos of designing a landscape which fits with its environment.
A Warkworth landscape design company has won a national award for creating a garden, making a cliff-top house in the Coromandel blend seamlessly with the surrounding environment.
Bill Holden Design and Landscape won the Landscape Industries Association Best Construction of the Year award last month.
Mr Holden says the project was a career highlight.
The brief was to integrate the 2ha site into the surrounding forest to envelope a house poised on the cliff edge above Tairua Beach.
“The excavated site was a big scar on the cliff face, so the landscape design was an absolute integral part of the project,” Bill says. “The aim was to return the site to the landscape.
“My philosophy is for a garden to reflect the character of a place. In that sense, it was probably the most satisfying job I’ve been involved in.”
Bill says a lot of the work had to be done before the house was built due to the narrowness of the site. Restoring the site required 400 tonnes of rock to create a stable terrace and planting hundreds of native plants.
“I used locally-sourced rocks so the material was the same as the surrounding cliff.”
The project also picked up three gold awards for design, construction and horticulture.
