
Riverside House
Central Blenheim is an urban site, and this home makes a deliberate architectural statement within it. Jimma Dillon and Smart Alliances approached the brief as a collaboration between design ambition and technical precision — the result is a home with a strong sculptural presence on the street and a very considered relationship with the river behind it.
The turret form is the first thing you notice — a signature move that gives the home its silhouette and distinguishes it from everything around it. It's the same confidence seen in Jimma Dillon's Rapaura House, applied here to an urban context where the home sits close to its neighbours and needs to hold its own. It does.
The plan is inverted by design. Living, dining, and kitchen occupy the second floor — elevated above the street, positioned to capture the river views and the light that comes with them. It's a decision that transforms an ordinary town section into something that feels genuinely removed from its surroundings. The ground floor handles arrival and the private spaces; the upper floor is where the house opens up.
An internal elevator was built into the design from the outset — not retrofitted, but resolved as part of the architecture. It's the kind of forward thinking that a home of this calibre deserves: beautiful now, practical for whatever comes next.
Building a multi-level urban home with this level of structural and spatial complexity — turret detailing, elevator shaft, an inverted plan above a constrained footprint — requires the kind of coordination and craft that only comes with experience. This one was executed without compromise.

















