Description
The house for a couple, who were friends of the architects, was to be an “ordinary house,” with the stipulation that it should feature masonry and a ridge roof. The house is still impressive today for the sensitive manner in which this simple program was met by characterizing the individual rooms instead of assigning them rigidly or leaving them completely without specification.
A small entrance leads into the large middle zone, the heart of the house with (dining-)table and fenestrated facade. The stairs to the bedrooms on the upper floor and the chimney separate the living room on the ground floor from the central dining area, although they remain otherwise strongly linked. A customized piece of furniture, usable from both sides, defines the far end of the space as a kitchen, which provides access to the covered courtyard and the play-/bed-/study room and lies as a mediating space between these areas.
The prefabricated windows are set freely into the masonry on all sides, at all points where a view of the exterior is desirable. The relationship to the garden is thus experienced in each of the rooms. The particular charm lies in the details: e.g., the manner in which the semi-transparent trellis separates the small room above from the landing. This makes it possible to extend the common room upward. Or the small step, which sets the bedrooms apart from the common landing, thus separating them, and at the same time adding more space to the living room below.
Drawings
Floor plan diagram, scale 1:500
Site plan
Entrance level with garage, covered courtyard, and living area, scale 1:200
Upper level with private rooms, scale 1:200
Longitudinal section of living and dining area and garage below, bedrooms above, scale 1:200
Cross section
Photos
Exterior view
Interior of view of central room on ground floor
Originally published in: Oliver Heckmann, Friederike Schneider (eds.), Floor Plan Manual Housing, fourth revised and expanded edition, Birkhäuser, 2011.