This house arises out of necessity.
A young couple is looking for a home. They explore the private market and housing cooperatives until they find a small plot—about 200 m²—on a quiet street in the neighborhood where they have always lived.
Here begins a long adventure. We start talking about a patio and vegetable gardens, about children and bedrooms and large kitchens. But we also talk about how to integrate the house into a modest urban context, how to relate to the street without losing privacy—and about money.
We talk about money because it is limited, and because during the development of the project COVID and the war in Ukraine arrive, bringing supply shortages and constantly rising prices.
In this context, our work becomes an exercise in simplification: the house is a diagram.
It is a geometric diagram, organized over two floors, with a central band containing the staircase, the bathrooms, and the vertical service shafts. This core of the house functions as a panopticon, connecting four equivalent rooms on each floor.
In one of these rooms—the one aligned with the entrance—we decide to remove the intermediate slab to create a double-height entrance courtyard that articulates the ascent to the central band and establishes a vertical relationship between floors.
On the ground floor, we place the kitchen and living areas, interconnected by sliding doors that allow for flexible use, along with a bathroom.
On the upper floor, three bedrooms with terraces reinforce their separation from the rest of the house through bands of built-in wardrobes, as well as another bathroom.
It is also a material diagram. The floor is paved with 12 × 25 cm red tiles laid in a running bond; the interior joinery is varnished birch; the windows are pine; in the bathrooms and kitchen we use 6.5 × 30 cm glossy white tiles and granite countertops. On the exterior, white render.
There is nothing more. The austerity in the choice of materials has an economic component but also a sustainable one: minimizing deliveries to the site means optimizing fuel consumption.
But beyond that, the architecture is better: by unifying the flooring, the space becomes continuous, without divisions, multiplying the sense of spaciousness in a dimensionally compact house. White limits heat absorption, and wood is a natural insulator.
From the diagram emerges a simple house, materially austere and spatially rich. A team effort in which the sensitivity and flexibility of the owners have been the most important factors in designing a house where, they tell us, they are happy.
And that is all.
