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
archiDE 
