It was vital to this Canterbury homeowner that their new home had a low visual impact on the local environment and skyline. With the home being nestled into the hillside, they wanted to create a feeling of returning to the land with the aesthetics needing to feel as natural as possible.

To ensure their new home blended into its surroundings, the homeowners made the decision to utilise their home’s '5th wall' and install a roof garden, with the extra natural element of planting native New Zealand Poa Citas; also known as a silver tussock.

Installing the roof garden wasn’t a last-minute, spontaneous decision, so the traditional timber roof structure was engineered to withstand the additional weight of a green roof system.

The plywood substrate was waterproofed by a two-layer Torch-On membrane system developed specifically for roof gardens. The Viking ‘Garden FLL Anti-Root’ membrane performs the important role of coercing plant and tree roots to turn away before membrane penetration, through its inherent specialised chemical treatment.

A Viking Roof Garden is a complete system of specialised layers that include proprietary drainage components and complementary accessories, so in this case, once all the components had been installed, the 180m² roof area was covered in 150mm deep of a growth medium; specially formulated for roof gardens.

Being a fine fawn grey foliage, and growing into a clump about 50cm tall, 800 Poa Citas were then used to complete the planting on the rooftops.

The installation of this roof garden couldn’t have gone better. The workmanship of the Viking Approved Applicator was excellent and all additional stakeholders involved: architect, builder, landscape architect and homeowners were beyond impressed with how the installed roof vegetation transformed the whole aesthetics of this Cliffside home.

The homeowners asked for a home that blends into the environment, and that’s exactly what they got — a tasteful, but visually mesmerising natural masterpiece.