A traditional village house in the heart of the city of Kaarst in North Rhine-Westphalia, which grew rapidly in the post-war period. Built around 1850 and constantly overwritten since then, it most recently served as an exten- sion to an adjoining hotel - with a corresponding room layout. In 2020, a family wanted to adapt the house to their ideas of living. We developed strategies from the task that had to meet our ambitions of a resource-saving conversion, the limited budget and the building family‘s desire for a new looking house.
FLEXIBILITY THROUGH TIMBER CONSTRUCTION
We don‘t want to fall for the simple prefabricated concrete lintel or steel beams that are common in conver- sions. All new structural components are made of wood or re-used and can be dismantled separately. They are scaled in comparison to existing timber components and are readable not through material contrasts but through scale distortion. The ground floor and the center of the house are stripped down to a few walls, a woo- den post and a large wooden beam take on the loads. The bricked outer wall facing the garden is replaced on by a three-part wooden frame, with wood-aluminum windows installed in the opening in a way that allows them to be easily mounted as well as removed again in the future. The wide timber frame also provides junction points for potential future walls, for example to add a individual room in order to make the ground floor barrier-free.
ECONOMICAL THROUGH GENEROSITY
The structural interventions allow a spaciousness that in turn makes it possible to be economical with “ex- pensive” components. The ground floor has no interior doors - only three cabinet-type doors are installed. The garden-facing façade is relatively inexpensive thanks to large, but structurally simple openings. The resulting transparency gives the courtyard-like garden a presence in all rooms on the ground floor. The new spacious- ness is reinforced by the economical use of materials. For example, the flooring on the ground floor, made of large-format laminated plywood panels - an inexpensive wooden floor covering - acts as a carpet that covers the ground floor. The floor-to-ceiling interior doors on the upper floor seem lavish at first, but their simple construction and lack of lintels mean that they are no more expensive than doors with standard measures.
ORNAMENTAL THROUGH REUSE
The reuse of building components serves not only ecological requirements but also economic ones - because it is inexpensive and thus enables more costly interventions. Components such as the front door have been relocalized, their old opening becomes a window, floorboards from a demolition container in the neighbour- hood supplement the existing building and dilapidated beams are patched up with demolition material. In addi- tion, there are architectural interventions that reuse found components in unexpected situations. Demolished window sills, which decorate wall faces and front sides in the interior, are transformed from profane components into ornamentation.
For us, conversion is a hierarchical but always strategic rearrangement of the found material with the addition of as little new as possible. If we are flexible in our expression, understand unexpected discoveries as productive twists and joyfully reuse found components, we don‘t need much new - even if it is supposed to look new.
