Monolith House

The clients asked for a house that disappeared into the hillside rather than sitting on top of it, and for exactly one room they would remember for the rest of their lives. Both requests pointed to the same answer: a single poured volume, cut into the slope, organized around one long skylight running the length of the plan.

Monolith House is a 340-square-metre residence built almost entirely from board-formed concrete, poured in place over eleven months. The building reads from the access road as a low, unbroken concrete wall — the house is almost entirely hidden below grade on the uphill side, opening fully to the valley on the downhill face.

The skylight PLINTH proposed in the first concept survived every subsequent revision unchanged. It runs 34 metres from the entry to the primary bedroom, splitting the plan into a north bar of service spaces and a south bar of living spaces, and it is the reason the clients say the house never feels like it's underground — even where, structurally, it is.

Construction ran through two winters. The concrete was poured in eighteen lifts, each formed with the same rough-sawn cedar boards salvaged from an outbuilding on the original site, so the formwork grain reads consistently across the entire building.