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Compact Minimalism Made Spacious and Bright

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This super cool and elegant exterior marks the transition to a very clever urban house from Studio Associato Archiplan in the Italian town of Sarginesco.

What appears to be an almost Dada-ist door in a wall is actually the front door.

Four metres high, the door looks like a very post-modern elegant door in a garden wall.

No windows look out on the neighbourhood on three sides.

On the fourth, a hedge.

Much more compact than it looks, the layout reads – left to right, dining room, kitchen bench (drawn like a ladder here) living room, light box courtyard, bedroom with bathroom behind it. (We do not see photos of the second bedroom/bathroom.

As you enter, take a look to the left here – to see the only windows that look out on the garden to a privacy hedge.

This curtain wall of glass beyond the dining room is behind the kitchen “fence” that contains the sink, stove and fridge.

These windows create an abundant greenery from the small garden, reflecting into the dining room end of the house.

Now, looking back to the center from the dining room, towards the central courtyard, and you see what appears to be yet more glass opening out onto more greenery.

But it is actually the same greenery being reflected back from the slightly opaque glass. This optical illusion is the central conceit of this clever small house.

Inside the courtyard at the centre of the house, light pours down lighting both sides of the house.

Because of the slight mirroring effect of the slightly milky glass, there is privacy between this public side and the private side of the house.

From the private part of the house the glass of this central light well appears to be transparent.

In an unusual arrangement, the bathroom is sheer glass behind the bedroom.

The bathroom is entered through a floor to ceiling sliding glass wall.

A skylight beyond the shower ushers light into a white pebble bed where it bounces around the bathroom.

Daylight floods the bathroom from both light wells.

Surprisingly, within the dark, enclosed windowless exterior wall, an astonishingly bright and airy and open space is created inside.