Cliffside Residence

The owners wanted a home that reaches out over the ocean. We had to make a 28-foot cantilever stand on a bluff that moves, without breaking the coastal commission’s height limit.

The challenge

The lot is a narrow strip of bluff above the Pacific, with unstable marine soils, a 24-foot height cap and a coastal permit that limited excavation to one season. The brief put the living room 28 feet out over the slope with nothing beneath it but air.

Studio Ardent’s design relied on board-formed concrete and full-height structural glass. Both are unforgiving: a poor pour or a glass panel out of tolerance would show on every wall of the house.

Our approach

We ran the project as design–build, so our engineers sat with the architect from the first sketch. Every structural option was priced and scheduled before it reached the drawings, and the foundation design was fixed before the permit was filed.

• Caissons drilled 60 feet into bedrock to carry the cantilever, completed inside the single permitted excavation season.

• Board-formed concrete poured in short lifts from mock-ups the owners signed off, so finish quality was agreed before the first wall.

• Structural glass fabricated in parallel with the frame and surveyed on site to a 3 mm tolerance before installation.

A cantilever is only as good as the ground behind it. We spent the first three months below grade so the next fifteen could go to plan.

Rebar tied for the cantilever slab, ahead of a two-lift pour.

The outcome

The residence was handed over in June 2025, on the date agreed at contract. Cantilever deflection was measured at handover and sits inside the design tolerance, and the board-formed walls needed no remedial work.

The owners moved in the week after handover. The house remains under our two-year workmanship warranty, with the same project lead on call.