THE RAUM > Design Works

What if we became the client and built a house ourselves? Running an architecture practice, we kept meeting the same problems: construction that drifts from the drawings, contractors that change too often, budgets that climb. To see those problems more clearly and to understand what clients go through, the whole studio decided to live through it as clients. We turned every stage of building a house into data and used it to think harder about what the best design for a client looks like. In the shared living and kitchen area, one entire wall is glazed, which offsets the way a skip-floor house can feel chopped up and narrow, and opens up the elevation. The garden off the living room sits 1.2m below the entrance, so the two areas separate naturally, and a low wall is enough to block the view from outside and give the clients an outdoor space of their own. The garden's main color shifts with the seasons, so the change of season reads from indoors as well. A south-facing window tied to the garden and kitchen plot draws the near view inside, and the gable ceiling is left exposed to give the living room height. Upstairs, the bedrooms follow the gable roof, which keeps the rooms from feeling uniform and flat and gives the interior a sense of movement.