Everyone else flattened their site. We read ours: seventeen degrees of hillside, and nine houses that step down it, hang off it, and borrow their views from it. The bulldozer stayed home.
Cut nothing · fill nothing · cantilever the restA slope is not a problem to be graded away. It's a free upper floor, a view you didn't pay extra for, and a reason no neighbour can ever block your light.
Every roof is the next terraceEach house sits one storey below its uphill neighbour — so every living room looks clean over the roof below it, to the valley. Nobody sees a wall. Everybody sees the view.
The maths stays indoorsBack-span, tie-down, and four hundred tonnes of counterweight buried uphill where you'll never see it. What you get is a living room floating over the grade — and the nerve to stand at the glass.
Flat sites face their fences.
Slopes face the horizon.
Board-formed concrete where the house meets the hill — you can read the timber grain in it — and white render where it meets the sky. Three bedrooms down-slope, living up top where the view is, and a terrace on the roof of the house below.