In New Zealand, the dramatic landscapes can capture your imagination. They’ve inspired some to design homes in harmony with the country’s awe-inspiring settings, which photographer Simon Devitt has now captured in a new volume, Cape to Bluff, a collection of 30 homes that include small beach homes, or baches, as they’re known, midcentury-inspired coastal dwellings, and riverside retreats set among gold miners’ cottages.

“It felt like the right time to show an aspirational view of how New Zealand architects respond to the varying nature of our landscape,” says Devitt, who produced the book alongside writer Andrea Stevens and graphic designer Luke Scott. “And it’s a contemporary view curated to convey not just different places in New Zealand but also different ways of living.”

Each home in the book is carefully chosen to give the reader a view of New Zealand they would never otherwise experience, bringing together architecture, landscape, and photography in one breathtaking volume. Read on for a few of its most impressive homes, brought into vivid focus by Devitt’s facility behind the lens.

Tutukaka House by Belinda George

Curled into a natural amphitheater, this gentle timber house turns to face the sun rather than the sea. Responding to the landform, its simple semicircle creates north-facing spaces sheltered from onshore winds. One corner braves the sea cliff, facing the salt and spray, but most of the house is surrounded by bush and orients toward a small valley, the ocean all the more present for being ignored formally. The site holds vivid childhood memories for its owner, Tom Bowden. His
parents purchased the coastal farm in the 1960s, and he grew up exploring the landscape alongside his five siblings. Forty years later and the Bowden family are returning 90 percent of the farm to native bush. Setting aside a small site for each family member, they sold five lots to fund the reforestation of the remaining 110-hectare estate, all of it protected under the QEII National Trust." layout="wide" credit="Photo by Simon Devitt" photoUserId=""/>

Party Wall House by Patchwork Architecture

Light Mine House by Crosson Architects

Scrubby Bay House by Patterson Associates

Set in splendid isolation in a small, surf-battered bay on the north coast of Horomaka Banks Peninsula, this rustic style dwelling is luxury accommodation at Annandale, a 4000-hectare beef and sheep farm. The bay is nature in the raw. Seals and penguins frequent the dense kelp beds offshore, whales and dolphins travel the coastline, and piled on the beach are tangles of bleaching driftwood. Faced with such an uncompromising location, architect Andrew Patterson eschewed a modern or abstracted path—which, he reasons, “would have fought the timeless nature of the bay”—in favor of a rural vernacular form, albeit on a monumental scale." layout="wide" credit="Photo by Simon Devitt" photoUserId=""/>

Split House by Studio2 Architects

Bivvy House by Vaughn McQuarrie

Ophir House by Nott Architects

Dune House by Julian Guthrie Architects

Coast House by Stacey Farrell

Black Quail House by Bergendy Cooke

Cape to Bluff by Simon Devitt, Luke Scott and Andrea Stevens out now in bookstores and online www.simondevitt.com

Also Appears In

10 New Zealand Homes That’ll Inspire a Trip to the Edge of the Earth