Building on a difficult site without fighting the slope, water or wind
8 min
The best thing about this
A sloping site is not a harder version of a flat one; it is a different exercise entirely. Solved in section rather than in plan, the slope hands you level changes, split floors and views over your own roof — all things a flat site has to invent artificially and expensively.
Creating Lasting Value
Walk the site after heavy rain and mark where water collects and where it runs. That map is worth more than any desktop study, and it will usually rule out one part of the site immediately while making another part obviously correct before a single line is drawn.
Designed for Your Lifestyle and Chances
Prevailing wind decides where the entrance can sit, which terrace will actually be used, and how much work shelter planting has to do. On exposed sites we have moved a front door fifteen metres for wind reasons alone, and it was unquestionably the right call.
Built Around Lifestyle and Opportunity
The houses people remember are almost always the ones where a difficulty is still visible in the finished building — a retaining wall that became a room, a level change that became a stair everyone sits on. Erasing the difficulty usually erases the interest along with it.
Project Summary
There is one case where we advise walking away, and that is ground conditions. Slope, water and wind are design problems with an upside; unstable ground is a cost problem without one. If the site investigation comes back badly, no amount of good design makes the numbers work.
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