Piha Bunker House short-listed in 'Olympics of architecture'
The unique, dark structure took architectural designer Chris Tate hours to conceive but 14 years to build by the black sand beach.
An award-winning house in West Auckland’s Piha, known as Bunker House, has been nominated for best coastal/rural villa at the World Architecture Festival.
Designer Chris Tate says the 150 square metre building, which took about seven years to design and seven years to build, was made for a client who uses it as a weekend home.
Earlier this year, it was named the 2025 Home of the Year by Home Magazine.
Designer Chris Tate says "the brief was to give the client an iconic piece of architecture".
Supplied / Simon Devitt
Related stories:
This is the second time Tate has been shortlisted at the World Architecture Festival. The first was in 2017 when they lost to a free children’s hospital building.
“That's really hard to compete with… I was like, ‘oh, we're stuffed. There's no way we can come back from that’. So we came back with our tail between our legs, but we had a great time in Berlin,” Tate told Afternoons.
One of the incentives of the Bunker House design was a desire to keep the carpark out of sight and maintain a sense of privacy.
Supplied / Simon Devitt
Designing Piha's Eye-Catching Bunker House
“Since then, I think the competition seems to have ramped up a lot, like in publicity and popularity, and it's become like a really big festival.
“People do liken it to the Olympics of architecture. So, of course, it's a huge honour to be included and to be shortlisted and we're pretty excited about it.”
Designer Chris Tate says he wanted to frame the coastline view.
Supplied / Simon Devitt
The house often captures attention. Tate says he was surprised by the backlash when there was publicity about the project.
“I'm pretty thick-skinned, but I was actually surprised at the backlash. I'm like, this is an amazing piece of art. What's there not to love about this?”
He remembers coming up with the initial idea in just three or four hours. Inspired by the beautiful coastline, he wanted to “frame” that view and keep the hectic car park in front out of sight.
“I thought, well, look, if we can just frame that view, it means you can actually move through the house, and be as private, or as public as you like.”
The Bunker House design gives the illusion of the building sitting on a V-shaped stilt on surface level.
Supplied / Chris Tate
The monolithic building has an illusion of being balanced on sharp, concrete V stilts. But it’s actually an X-shaped foundation which also stores all the services to the house, such as power cables and storm water, so you can’t see any pipes or wiring outside, he says.
“I did want it to touch the ground lightly … it is a collision of art and architecture and engineering,” he says.
“The whole base is actually on these huge, big, solid concrete railway tracks that are 600 by 600 wide, and they're actually piled down to rock, about 18 metres down, so we had to excavate the whole site and retain it to actually keep the sand out of the foundation, but it was incredibly complicated.
“We were limited by what the cartage company could actually cart down to the beach … so that almost dictated some of the form as well, just the mechanics of getting it there.”
Supplied / Simon Devitt
With an 'old bach' kind of feature, residents can also park their cars or put their surfboards underneath, he says.
Other New Zealand nominees in the awards include Warren and Mahoney in the Civic and Community Buildings section, for Aotearoa Archives building. Warren and Mahoney + MJMA Architecture & Design, have been shortlisted for Hiwa, Recreation Centre at the University of Auckland.
Patterson Associates made the shortlist with Toi Manawa, the new King’s College performing arts centre in Auckland and DCA Architects of Transformation has been shortlisted in the Display section for Whare Waka in Rotorua.
The World Architecture Festival is being held at Miami in November, which Tate will fly to the US for.
