Home Design Find

No Comments »

Clever Four Storey Space Saver in Japan

In this tiny house in Japan by Tato Architects some clever space saving ideas are used.

On every floor in this very narrow building, there’s only enough width for one room.

This design makes the most of every one.

Obviously a house constrained into 4 stories, barely one room wide, is going to be dominated by stairs.

But actually, this is the only staircase exposed in the building.

And even that stair ends in what looks like two pieces of furniture, a chest of drawers and a coffee table, that happen to function as a stair.

Starting on the ground floor, a faux wardrobe by the entrance door in fact houses a small toilet, and… a staircase.

The toilet door is tucked under the staircase inside the tall end of the ‘wardrobe’ stair and allows the maximum spaciousness for the bathing part of the bathroom.

On the other side of the staircase, the bathroom sink is separated from both the hidden toilet and the spacious bath, next to the stairs that ascend through the wardrobe. Read the rest of this entry »

No Comments »

Benign ‘See-Through’ Renovation in Singapore from Wallflower

This charming little townhouse is a renovation of an old Singapore Mews house that was extraordinarily poorly designed.

This was its barely liveable windowless floor plan! Ripe for a radical makeover, but how to do that while staying within the long, narrow, windowless exterior wall?

With too many walls, and no light from each side, none of the rooms were liveable.

Here is the makeover proposed by Singapore’s Wallflower Architecture and Design.

Note the square courtyard in its center (10).

This central courtyard lights up all three ‘rooms’ to each side, the living the dining, and…

…the bedroom.

The light from the one small courtyard gets recycled between all three ‘rooms’.

That one change, by bringing light down into the center of the long space makes all the difference to the house.

Then, the architects opened up the entire back wall of the house, so light comes in from the back garden. Read the rest of this entry »

No Comments »

Dutch Architect Couple Design Their Live-Work Studio

Here’s an interesting house on the sand dunes in Holland by Dutch architects Jetty and Maarten Min.

It is the architects’ own rather quirky live/work studio home.

The owner-architects had always wanted to experience living high up with a view out to sea over the sand dunes.

Amusingly, tree trunks are put to use in their natural state to be supporting struts within the house.

The metal connectors look particularly brutal attached to the raw tree trunks, quite unlike the effect of seeing the same kinds of connectors in normal timber construction.

The architects seem to be making a statement that makes us rethink our relationship to the trees which support so much of our infrastructure. Read the rest of this entry »