Technical sheet
Read moreRead less- Location
- Gent
- Date
- 2020 - 2022
- Client
- Private
- Surface
- 165m² net, 200m² brut
- Sustainability
- EPB < E-20 (passive house)
- Partners
- Stabimi (stability), Struktuur (EPB, VC en ventilation report)
- Status
- Executed
- Executor
- Builthings
- Photos
- Johnny Umans
Reprise
A renewable passive house in an urban environment, where lifelong living and sober luxury are part of the package.
Rebuilding. Trying again, in the same spot. We break down the building and build a new one. A better one. The inhabitants have lived long enough on this plot so they know very well what they want and need. It’s going to be a ‘still water runs deep’ kind of thing. The structure of the plans may seem simple, but everything has been thought of.
In the front façade you can find an alcove to take shelter when it’s raining. All around you find brick and glass. Behind the door lies a robust entrance. Excess width allows life, allows meeting guests. On the right a multifunctional space: laundry room, bicycle storage, but even a sports area. Double use of the same spaces. Behind, living functions. A patio cuts through the mass. Black tiles, wood and structured glass in the kitchen. Concrete. Behind the last room, that is even a bit higher still: the garden. A stairwell curls around an opening and rises to the first floor. Spaces that can be bedrooms, or something else. A thin seam is visible in the ceiling. Here, the floor can be demounted to make a hole in the entire house. Later an elevator can be fitted into the hole. We don’t know what tomorrow and the day after will bring. A small bathroom enables further interpretation. The urban envelope of the house is designed so that it tactically withdraws in the right places. Carefully touching on its neighbour. A wild green roof is visible from the window, and we continue up the stairs. The second floor has the quality of a penthouse. A terraced house trying to be an apartment. A withdrawn volume sunk between two more wild green roofs. A bedroom and a bathroom. Too big and with a view. Inviting you to stay a little longer.
A plan that works now, but still so the day after tomorrow. A house where you can and want to live your entire life. Sober, decent and honest materials. Luxury by spaciousness. Looking for small moments of emotions. Invisible sustainable techniques. A passive house with solar panels, a hybrid boiler and D ventilation system. But mainly a framework for a life not entirely known yet. By determining a lot, we allow the unknown.
A new drawing on the same page
A young family has been living for years on the outskirts of Ghent, between the station, a lot of green and the river Lys. The location is perfect, the house is not. They ask us to think about rebuilding it. To tear down and start over, in the same place. The family knows by now what works and what doesn’t. Where the sun rises, where the sound comes from. When you want to let it in and when you don’t. They know the neighbours, the street, the neighbourhood.
The program is a double one. One for today and one for tomorrow. Today; a large entrance, a spacious bicycle storage, a guest toilet, a sports area, a laundry room, space for techniques, a cool storage basement, a luminous kitchen, a luminous living room, two bathrooms, two bedrooms, a guest room, a library, a place to project films, a place where art can be displayed on the wall. Tomorrow: that we don’t know yet, but let’s not block anything. Even when we are old and grey we want to be able to go upstairs. The functions of the rooms need to be able to change. There can be room where an elevator fits, but it doesn’t have to be placed today. The family wants to be able to live in this house for life.
It will be like drawing on a sheet of paper where the last drawing was erased. Not an entirely white sheet, because you know what lines were erased. Knowing the old lines, we do better now.
All customized pieces are meticulously drawn out. The joints of the tiles follow the furniture modulations. Cupboard doors, grips, kitchen island, sink, … all align with the lines of the tiles. What opens, is made of wood. What can get wet or dirty is made of tiles.
An alcove in the upright cupboard serves as a beverages dispensing zone and a space to move the coffee maker out of sight.
The big lines
The design starts with a few rounds of negotiations at the urban planning department. The allowed building-envelop is the start. Using volume and sun studies we show that rearranging of this volume brings more quality to the house and the integration in the space. We remove a patio and give this volume to the annexe on +1. The patio allows the light to enter deep into the core of the house. The rear façade is beautifully aligned with both neighbours, without casting extra shadows.
The plan is built up frugally. The house has load-bearing walls from the front to the rear façade so all dividing walls could be removed theoretically in case the future would prove it necessary. In the core of the house, along the patio, a stately staircase is installed in a concrete stairwell. The plan reminds of an old house. Rectangular rooms, efficient circulation, the façade is always closeby. Variations on a well-tried theme.
The facades as well remind of an old house. Moving from big to small, we distil more and more. Together with the client we dream of a façade where God is in the details. Having houses from the interwar period in mind, a game of texture, alcoves, offsets, patterns and orientations of the bricks is elaborated. Every brick is drawn.
The top floor reclines somewhat to fit the slope of the adjacent neighbours. The brickwork jumping forward on the first floor reminds of a typical alcove. The entrance below is fitted in an recessed alcove; to receive guests cosily, or to put the bags down when looking for keys in the rain. Zones of vertical brickwork demarcate the floors. The windows within do what they want. Each floor has its own needs.
The small lines
There is no need to yell, to have character. We let the house talk calmly for itself. No flashy materials, but an understandable and timeless palette of materials is compiled, to become the guide for the whole house.
- Brute exposed concrete for all load-bearing structures: the ceilings, the columns, the stairs, the concrete walls at the stairwell and facades.
- Ceramic tiles for all wet spaces, both the floor as the worktops: black in the kitchen and white in all sanitary facilities.
- Warm floors for the dry spaces: wooden parquet for the living space, colourful linoleum in the sleeping parts
- Birch multiplex for all customized pieces: the kitchen and bathroom cupboards, the stair railing, the reveals of the windows
- Dark bronze anodized windows for all facades
- Where obscurity is wanted, we use textured glass. This happens in the façade or in the kitchen, or between the hall and the entrance.
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