Client: confidential, site: confidential
Design: Monolab, team: J.W. van Kuilenburg, L. Veeger, W. Hoogerwerf with H. Heckwolf, D. Nieuwstad, S. Prouille, R. Salazar, H. Schurk
Year: 2001

VILLA XXX

…jaws vs nesting

HIDE-OUT

Our clients are living in a small house on a large piece of land; an old vegetable garden. They asked us to design a villa, in the back part of their land, behind a small wooden shed. The villa had to be invisible from the road in order to allow for a building permit by the municipality. By concealing this villa, we created a hide-out.

CROCODILE

We lifted a slab of soil and grass and inserted two concrete columns into the gap. These columns prevent the program from being eaten. The structural elements allow the program and inhabitants to nestle safely: this villa is not a crocodile.

RAFT

The soil conditions are poor and the garden is somewhat swampy which makes a Dutch jungle. We inserted a floating floor, like a raft. The raft offers comfort. It makes the villa approachable and it extends out by a small terrace over the garden. It has a pit -a shallow excavation- that contains the children’s rooms surrounded by flexible, sliding glass panels. When the children have grown up and are living elsewhere, the pit can become a study, a second living or a master bedroom. Aluminum floor panels heat the villa. The ‘sky’ over the raft is a vast concrete surface, without any interruption and lit by floor spots.

KAABA

In order to free the villa from programmatic debris, we used the old, small, wooden, black, contextual shed. We transformed it into a black, mysterious block and placed it in the center of the plan. It resembles the Kaaba, here surrounded by its inhabitants. The Kaaba is very dense with program including a wardrobe, bathroom, kitchen, study, toilet, master bedroom, stairs, services, etc. It perforates the slab and serves the two worlds over and under the slab. Seams in its surface tell us which parts are operational.

SPLIT SCREEN

The bedroom window of the Kaaba acts as a split screen. It cuts the slab and looks into two worlds at the same moment: living below and nature on top.

FLOATING ROCKS

To avoid the gap becoming cave-like and to free the slab, the facades are completely glazed. Facades are positioned in three conditions: set- back at the entrance, in-line at the end and tilted at the garden. The tilting plane has three advantages: it makes interior inside the glass that is not covered by the slab, it reflects the sky during the daytime (stealth) and it allows cut and polished glass rocks to be glued on the top side. These ‘floating glass rocks’ allow the inhabitants to climb the tilted glass surface between terrace and slab.