House Giebel
An old settler’s house, built around 1900 and repeatedly extended until the 1990s, grew from an initial length of 9 m to almost 25 m. The width of the house remained unchanged at 7.50 m, resulting in a substantial gross floor area of 186 m².
Although the walls are very thick, the volume of the house fully met the spatial requirements of the threeperson family. No extensions or annexes were needed. The long, narrow volume seemed to offer great potential to transform the small, low rooms into their opposite. In addition, the house had numerous wall openings of different sizes, from 40 × 40 cm up to a garage door, since it had been used for living, storage, workshop, and garage.
Trusting this randomness of opening formats, no further wall openings were made in the long façades, and the varied geometry of the existing ones was kept. Some openings were closed with frameless glass, others with framed windows. A sliding door was placed on the outside to fully open the width of an existing wall opening.
The oldest part of the house on the street side consists of two rooms, which were preserved and are now used as bedroom and guest room. The original entrance location was also retained. This leads into a cloakroom and bathroom, enclosed with translucent glass, which passes both artificial and daylight into the entrance area. Further inside are the kitchen and the play, dining, music, and living areas. Here, all interior walls and even the floor slab were removed. To brace the house transversely without interior walls, four slanted timber frames were connected to the old roof structure. Most of the old roof beams and all the clay roof tiles were preserved.
The residents inhabit this universal space – which fills the full width and height of the house – with great creativity. An interior staircase leads to the attic. On the street side is the parents’ bedroom, next to it a room for the daughter, a WC, and a study. For the bedroom, a large square opening was installed in the street gable, which could be interpreted as a sign of the transformation. The main part of the attic consists of open galleries, voids, and an indoor terrace at the garden gable, where various activities – sleeping, playing, making music, etc. – take place.
The indoor terrace is reached via a nearly 10 m long narrow catwalk that bridges the large space and offers new perspectives on daily activities. Separated by a glass façade, the outdoor terrace follows, with a stair leading down into the garden.
The house is heated by an air-source heat pump, visibly located at the street gable, which distributes heat via underfloor heating. The ground floor has exposed screed, while the upper floor is made of pine plywood panels, also used to clad sloping ceilings and interior walls. The old brick walls on the ground floor were plastered inside with clay and partly outside with lime. No additional insulation was needed due to the wall thickness. Bathroom, WC, kitchen, and the study received walls of frosted glass. The triangular space above the parents’ bedroom entrance, between rafters and ridge, was closed with transparent glass to acoustically separate it from the open gallery while preserving the flowing space.
