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.
Although a relatively small beach house (150 square metres, including its generous deck), it took 14 years to complete — approximately seven for design and seven for construction. According to Tate, he and the overseas-based client would “have a year-long debate about the cladding, then go away and have a year-long debate about the kitchen. We also had to present four or five different options for each thing. Every detail in the house was a project on its own.”
This level of detail and commitment to the original vision of the project is evident at every touchpoint. The house is unapologetically ‘masculine’; a mean-looking bunker that could easily house a blockbuster baddie. Yet it was built to a planet-friendly, passive house standard.
It is composed of a minimal, brutalist pavilion balanced on sharp, concrete V stilts. “They are actually an X,” explains the designer; the lower, inverted V has been dug deep into the sandy land to ensure stability. Tate recalls the many difficulties presented by its design: “I was limited to how big I could make those Xs because they are precast and there was a limit as to how much size and weight could be transported to site,” he says. “They had to be designed to the limit of cartage.” This meant he had to splay out the bottom half to make them fit. “We had to dig the whole site out because it was sand, and temporarily retain the whole thing. There’s 500 by 600 railway lines running through the site, and we’ve got piles down to 18 metres,” he continues.
Much like the Xs, all the services and functional elements have been hidden away to make sure they don’t detract from the clean, minimalist beauty of the place. There is no visible wastewater equipment and power lines have all been concealed. Despite the fact that the house has a mechanical airflow, none of the machinery that makes the house function is on view either inside or outside.
The otherwise monolithic structure has a thin sliver of an opening that looks out to the sea, its black hue making it look less like a Soviet-era bunker and more like one of the many African tribal masks that influenced modernists such as Picasso and the avant-garde. “I do see it as art,” says Chris — and it is hard not to be convinced that this level of detail and craft, tenacity, room for interpretation, and unique materiality is not bordering on the sculptural rather than the merely functional.
Its skin is a metallic membrane composed of asymmetrical pores that give it a half-organic, half-synthetic feel, like a sea sponge made of liquid metal. The material is a Canadian product that uses recycled aluminium cans, and Chris’s goal was for it to echo the volcanic stone so common in the area. It accomplishes this perfectly.
There is darkness inside, too; a cave-like encasement where almost every surface is black, angular, and with metallic accents. The raw steel kitchen bench is anchored at one end and cantilevers dramatically at the other, each surface faceted and angular. There are touches of natural stone, and glass partitions with metallic mesh detailing. The proportions of the bedrooms are nice and square. All storage and laundry facilities have been hidden away in a partition wall.
Although black dominates the interior, this is the architectural equivalent of a Zambesi wardrobe: variations of sheen and texture, geometry and finish give the place enough interest and vibrancy despite its monochromatic soul.
The detailing in this beach house borders on the microscopic; however, this has not been done in spite of the larger picture. “We did a whole lot of studies, with different sight-lines, including from the next door surf club, to make sure that from the inside you would lose the car park and see the breaking swell,” says Chris, pointing out that the large public beach car park is non-existent from the inside. “It just takes a bit of the chaos out of the environment.”
For anyone sitting down on the deck, there is absolute privacy and communion with the ocean. However, as soon as one steps up to the long viewing slit, there is an immediate shift and the viewing platform allows a very direct interaction with the people walking below. “It is very exposed here, but all you have to do is take two steps back and you are completely private,” says Chris.
This duality is refreshing. There is a sense of camaraderie with passers-by — the house is unfenced and it is said that many a tourist has picnicked under the generous cantilever.
One of the often-forgotten aims of residential architecture is its ability to create joy or wonder, not just for its inhabitants but for the people who happen to come across it. This house does both deftly, through a commendable mixture of vision, materiality, engineering, and art. It contributes an iconic object not just to its owner but also to the public realm.
Words: Federico Monsalve
Images: Simon Devitt
Project Credits
Architecture — Chris Tate Architecture
Build — Team Builders
Kitchen — Studio Italia
Interior Design — Lume Design
Precast Concrete — Concretec
Louvres — Louvretec
Furniture — Tim Webber
Automation — Automation Associates
Interior Doors — Matisse
Lighting — ECC
Citation
Despite strong vocal opposition, those involved in this project persevered, for 14 years, with a very clear concept for a piece of iconic architecture. This holiday home on a very public beachfront deftly balances its client’s brief and peculiar context with an innate ability to instill joy and wonder in the many people that walk beside it. Clever engineering and environmental nous, material innovation and a bold aesthetic all combine for a truly memorable, daring and entirely unique sculptural object.
