Bassam El Okeily designed this very interesting house in a small city called Bilzen in Belgium. Bassam El Okeily designed this house for a couple passioned by history and art.

The house has a closed ground floor exterior (entrance & garage) topped by a total transparency in glass. The display window reveals two balconies in skewed positions projection from a white façade.

The lower balcony contains a reading corner for a library belonging to the gentleman of the house, while providing him with a sheltered view of the street. The upper balcony accommodates an artist’s studio, the private domain of his wife. Blue light turn the façade into a spectacular light sculpture after dark.

Architecture become a pretext to chair something else than the sidewalk. A house is a space to live; it could also be a place to remain.

what‘s a house? A space to live, to project our happiness between four walls, then to spread out our vanity outside these walls.

Can there be space for something else?
A space for our melancholy, our scars, Then the luggage of our memories.

It is a narrow house which leaves with its threshold, our thousand and one smooth and invented lives.

It is a narrow house which offers to a narrow street: the history of a man, a woman and their passions.

History of a house imagined to live. But also to remain.

Special thanks to Bassam El Okeily for sharing!
Photography by Tim Van de Velde

Client: Mr Menten & Mss Bienkens
Architect: Bassam El Okeily
Architect Collaborator : Karla Menten
Statics: Ingineer Ten Half

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Located in Asse, Belgium, this house called ‘Greenhouse’, is designed by Verdickt & Verdickt Architecten and stands out because of its affordability and heat trapping ability.

The house is furnished minimally with whites and woods to complement the feeling of ‘openness’ that prevails throughout the abode. Such is achieved through the reverted house layout in which the private quarters are located below whilst the rest of the house is located above and set in an open-floor concept. This way, the architect is able to take advantage of the elevation to highlight the foliage and surrounding scenery through the floor-to-ceiling windows as well as attain ‘openness’.

In contrast to the second storey, the private quarters beneath is arranged in a ‘closed’ manner with narrow corridors and minimal windows.

Photography by Luc Roymans

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Transparency, reflections and connections between the different levels determine the daily routine of the large family living in.

Brussels studio Label Architecture have transformed the interior of a family house in Brussels, Belgium, by covering some walls in rough, black-stained osb and painting others white.

It consists in the transformation of a 270 m² family house. A punctual intervention, centred on the heart of a traditional house in Brussels, gave to this dwelling an outstanding character. Transparency, reflections and connections between the different levels determine the daily routine of the large family living in. From the first floor, the stairwell was entirely emptied on the three higher-ups levels.

A staircase in openworked metal links together the two first floors. At each level, glazed windows were handled with care, on all the height of the dividing wall, bringing a real physical feeling, not so far from vertigo. Some of them are pierced by little round openings, allowing inhabitant to communicate from a level to another one.

Behind the windowpanes, the platforms, transitions spaces, were covered by OSB stain in black, creating a mirror effect to those who look at them from the opposite openings. In front of this openings, mirrors were installed on the blind attached wall. The family benefits the unexpected connections of this surprising arrangement, worthy of Lewis Caroll.

*Label architecture is an architectural practice based in Brussels, Belgium. Its three partners, Jean-Didier Bergilez (1974), Michel Lefèvre (1978) and Thibaut Rome (1977) opened their agency in October 2004. Their projects, on various scales, are as much an opportunity to play with existing space, from their common reference points, as not to take themselves too seriously while being serious about their work.

Via furfin
Photographs are made by Bepictures

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This house was designed in 1969 by architect Herman Andriessen. A year after completion he passed away. In 2005 interior architect Arjaan De Feyter and his wife bought the house which was in total decay and ready for demolition.

In 2005 interior architect Arjaan De Feyter and his wife bought the house which was in total decay and ready for demolition. They retained the original plan of the first floor, which is where they were to live.

They extended the ground floor so as to install a workspace, whose visual impact they mitigated by means of large glass walls with profiles that were barely visible. The house was first stripped down to the steel skeleton and the vaulting. The steel was seriously corroded in many places and had to be restored. The aluminum sandwich panels and the original wooden windows, now double-glazed, were then fitted back into the renovated skeleton. A lot of attention was paid to designing new and better joinery details.

The biggest challenge in the renovation was the problem of cold bridges that is characteristic of steel skeletons that are also exposed to the outside. The solution was provided by a quick-drying two-component resin, which was sprayed onto all the beams and pillars in contact with the outside air. This four centimeter coating of resin does not have a spectacular U-value, but it does adhere exceptionally well to steel and is totally damp-proof, so that there is no risk at all of condensation moisture. On the inside of the house, the steel skeleton is now completely enveloped in an amorphous layer of polymer and then encased in painted MDF. The villa does now complies with current standards for domestic comfort, while the memory of the original house remains alive.

Arjaan De Feyter designed every single interior detail as well.

Special thanks to Arjaan de Feyter for sharing!
Photographs are made by Stijn Bollaert

Text and pictures are from Arjaan de Feyter

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News from home. Brussels studio adn Architectures designed this extension to a family house in Kraainem, Belgium. Called House Satiya, the project features an inclined triangular skylight at one end of the pitched roof.

The following information is from the architects:

The client wished to transform and extend his house to be able to accommodate a large family. The existing situation, a working house of the years ‘30 of 100 sqm, consequently will become a resolutely contemporary house of 350 sqm. The first will is to include the extension in continuity with the neighbourhood (inclined roof, black tiles, white painted bricks, etc).

Secondly, the intention is to reflect on creative architecture, as well by its external/interior geometry, as by a more significant dimension (reflexion on textures of the external facing amongst other things).

The extension results in a principle of envelope recovering a volume in which the included spaces are conceived like functionalized boxes. A play of full and vacuum is set up and expresses the will of close, direct, generous relations between the various levels. The external openings meet the internal needs for the house, with the specific choices of sights on the external environment, like the run of the sun during the day.

The street front defines clearly the position of the entrance. External and interior volume is a set of diagonals inducing a dynamics of space. The choice of abstraction by the black & white is a desire to propose the conceptual aspect of the project while allowing architecture built to put itself “besides”, to allow the space to live as such.

Photographs are made by Filip Dujardin

More info and pictures:

+ Satiya house / adn architectures on Archdaily
+ House Satiya by adn architectures on Dezeen

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