Stunning Home Perched on Vancouver Cliff

“The more peculiar [the landscape], the more opportunities you have.”
—Matthew McLeod

Most homes simply sit on the land. Their designs are intended to accent views, emphasize natural features, and mirror the topography surrounding them.

But there are a special few ones that are part of the land itself—homes that express both the nature and the spirit of the Earth so completely that it’s hard to say where the land ends and the home begins.

Vancouver’s BlackCliff House is such a home. Perched atop a wind-lashed block of granite forty feet above the Salish Sea, it’s a stunning example of landscape, design, and lifestyle coming together to create something extraordinary.

As Matthew McLeod, principal at McLeod Bovell Design in Vancouver, explains, this house on a cliff was one of the most extreme he’s ever worked on.

The sheer cliff and the rolling, undulating contours of the underlying terrain were leading considerations for everything that followed.

“It demands a certain approach,” McLeod says. “Not every location [on the lot] was buildable, so we had to touch the building down in a couple of landing spots. That shapes the kind of plan you can have.”

At the same time, the site’s limitations opened up a range of unique creative ideas.

“The more peculiar [the landscape], the more opportunities you have,” he says.

The result is a house with what McLeod calls “a peculiar geometry”—two wings with axes that converge to form a central domestic core.

The convergence creates an intriguing void in the middle, introducing air, light, space and visual interest in a manner that a standard floorplan couldn’t do.