The brief was for a fairly large house, with separate accommodation for their adult son and two daughters. As the property is in an private estate we designed the house to be open to the street, with a glass link across a koi-pond as the entrance.
This also separated the guest wing with the son’s bedroom over it from the main house, creating almost a cottage, consisting of the gym, guest suite, double garage, the son’s lounge/study and his suite.
The crescent shape of the stands determined the shape of the house towards the street, as we tried to keep the house as far south on the stand as possible, because the stands were fairly shallow towards the north.
To get enough light into the house we used double volume windows, deeply shaded to only allow winter sun into the living areas.
By using a huge internal balcony upstairs and an atrium we were able to give the two daughters two north facing suites and lounge, with a balconies both on the north and south side.
The style is contemporary, spacious, light filled, blending indoor/ outdoor thru the use of sliding / folding doors enabling us to open the lanai/bar and family/breakfast areas onto the pool, and onto an internal atrium.
As the client had to consolidate 3 stands, the shape was long east/west, but shallow to the north. The house was thus designed to make the most of the long north elevation,, and the slight elevation was used to create an infinity edge pool.
To prevent boring corner columns in the living/entrance area we used two beams taking the columns away from the building. The street façade was deliberately fragmented to avoid a huge monolithic structure, and to create interesting details as you move along the street boundary.
Courtesy of Nico van der Meulen Architects
