A couple in Australia owned a piece of land on the southwestern coast of Australia. They wanted a unique vacation home design for it, so they approached Modscape, an architectural firm near Melbourne. Modscape produced this design concept: a house that's hanging off the edge of the cliff, giving a panoramic and perhaps terrifying view of the ocean.
Modscape proposes anchoring the house to the cliff with steel pins driven into the cliff face. Prefabricated modules would hang off the pins. Residents would enter the home through the carport, which is at surface level. An elevator provides access to lower levels which offer an unobstructed view of the raging seas below.
All of this sounds really expensive. Perhaps the owners should try to find a builder who's willing to improvise and user cheaper materials.
-via Inhabitat
You can never be too far above the ocean to be safe from freakishly-high and powerful waves, unless you're in a plane, hot-air balloon or the space shuttle.
Just ask the men who died aboard the Ocean Ranger - an oil rig off the coast of Newfoundland - when it went down back in the 80's. The computers that controlled the ballast tanks and pumps were all shorted out and destroyed when a rogue wave hit a porthole that wasn't storm-rated and smashed it out, letting water into the ballast control room. That porthole was approx. 70' above the waterline.
Cliffs exist because of erosion. The only way something that vertical is there in the first place is because it's constantly crumbling - otherwise it'd be a beach or a swamp or something gentler.
The media are full of stories of houses falling into the sea because of costal erosion...and this looks like another, just waiting to happen.