We were tasked to create a new home for our client’s family of five, who loved more than anything to spend time with each other, and whose brief reflected so. Immediately, we established our main aim to provide generous visual porosity through and between spaces inside the home. This naturally resulted in us taking a volumetric approach to interpreting the client’s brief, whilst at the same time not losing touch on creating intimate as well as necessarily private spaces for the client and his young family.

The main entrance of the house is approached through a series of granite steps. The deliberate use of stone grounds the entrance experience (and the house), crafting a path leading one from the lower car porch level to the main habitable spaces. Through this, we were able to mitigate the level differences necessitated by the requirements as set out by the authorities.

Steering away from the conventional floor plate-upon-floor plate connected by a central core, we endeavoured to challenge ourselves in crafting a multi-level layered experience as one traverses through the house. We felt that through this exercise in layering, we would be able to overcome the narrow site to create spaces that are lofty and light-filled. Addressing this site constraint meant that from the exterior with its solid and strong planar form, it is hardly expected that walking through the internal spaces would be akin to a little never-ending, playful adventure. A drawn out spatial experience awaits as one enters the house - a series of little bursts of spaces.

The changing volumes of the various pockets of spaces - from the double volume living room, to the narrow staircase that releases one out onto the mezzanine study; coupled with carefully-placed glazing that facilitates visual connections to and from spaces over several levels, enable one to realise one’s own body in relation to the scale of each space. This was an important achievement for us, as we strive in our body of work to always come back to the human scale, to how one’s body understands and fits within a crafted space, within a home.