Lyrical lines and rational sequences. A spectacular house for a family that loves to entertain

 

Huis H, Holland   - Architecture and Interior Design

Brief: ‘The World at Home’

We like to Entertain.  Our house should be a warm place for family, friends and close relations. The cosy centre of the house for our inner circle should be symbolized by two fireplaces – one in the dining room and one in the living room. Here we live our private lives, away from hectic daily life. The entrance hall should be spacious and light and give immediate impact. The running of the house should be energy neutral and use solar panels.

Design: Our starting point was the ‘spacious and light’ hallway giving ‘immediate impact’.  We placed this at the core of the house, creating a great space reaching from the ground floor right through to the roof and even beyond as we crowned the hall with a lantern of steel flowers and glass. Instantly this creates the desired light and spacious environment. The steel frame with the floral design is a motif repeated throughout the whole house, used as circulation railings on the first floor overlooking the hall, within the façade, on the doors to the house, outdoor railings and to create a spectacular pool house; integrating the design and creating a firm visual coherence.

The plan for House H is a sequence in itself, where variations in the use of the same materials tempt you to explore the next room and even the dimensions of the individual spaces are sequential. This creates a spatial and visual story as you move around the house, individual rooms forming a ring around the central grand hall.  Wood, marble and floral steel frames are used to different effects and are found in varying functional and decorative guises in different rooms, linking spaces, creating a cohesive experience and visual ‘buttonholes’; always leading your memory back to other areas of the house. A variety of marbles are used as the flooring in the great hall, on the fireplaces in the living and dining areas and on walls in the bathrooms. The wood is used for the main doors to the living and dining areas, as floor to ceiling cupboards on the landing and along and a walk-in wardrobe on the first floor. A sophisticated series of hallways link all areas of the house and the outside areas to the inside and spaces of sequential dimensions lead you from the grand hall into the other areas on the grournd floor. The floorplan also takes into consideration the required space for the family to relax ‘away from hectic daily life’; we positioned the primary family spaces towards the back of the house on the ground floor and on the second floor we even created a hidden room without windows, ideal for escaping from the world to read, listen to music, watch a film or simply sit.

Entertaining friends is also key to this house, so aside from the formal dining area on the ground floor we devoted a partially hidden basement level to house a café, bar and disco complete with DJ booth. An outdoor staircase leads from the café straight up to the pool area creating easy flow between all entertainment spaces and keeping the whole area separate to the private family space.

Within the private rooms on the ground floor we placed two fireplaces, one in the dining room and one in the living room as outlined by the client, both either side of the same central wall creating a ‘cosy centre of the house’. An abstract pattern in natural stone on the fireplaces is a second cohering motif as it mirrors the same design seen on the façade, visually marrying the interior of the house with the exterior. 

This second motif is an integral part of the façade. An abstract series of rectangles, the design appears at first mathematical and logical but no one line defining the rectangles runs continuously throughout the whole pattern. The pattern is expressed on the façade made from Danish handmade brick and uses a variety of textures; German chalkstone in both smooth and rough chiseled finishes along with glass, incorporating windows within the design and creating tactile and visual depth.

All roof spaces, the house, the lantern and the pool house, are covered in solar panels so that the running of the house is energy neutral. Alongside this we employed traditional principles to facilitate energy efficiency. The walls of the façade are much thicker than typical homes. This limits any extra heating or cooling from external elements, helping to maintain a constant temperature within the house throughout the year.

The final feature and a stunning reference to the environmentally conscious nature of the house is an open courtyard situated to one side of the house. This small garden with a towering central tree is encased by the house on two sides and by the facade on the other two, with glassless windows exposing its beauty outside world at all levels and seamlessly incorporating the garden within the house. To create aesthetic and prosaic coherence and harmony throughout the house as a whole we consistently linked the interior to the exterior of the house, whether by literally bringing the outside in with the courtyard, or with repeated sequences and motifs working from the facades into the interior design. House H, being composed of juxtaposing poetic lines and rigid sequences, will be the first full-grown architectural representation of eijkingdelouwere’s artistic ideals.