Case study · Residential development
Updated
Seven houses that turn their back on the street and their face to a private garden.
01 · Starting point
A premium development in Wilanów, Warsaw: seven two-unit buildings. The developer wanted a modern, flat-roofed form, and the local zoning plan said something entirely different about roof geometry.
We designed a layout in which every house turns away from the street and opens onto its own screened garden. Hence the name: Secret Gardens.
- Project
- Z3 Secret Gardens
- Client
- OPUS X Sp. z o.o.
- Location
- Warsaw, Wilanów
- PUM
- 1778,5 m²
- Number of buildings
- 7 two-unit buildings
- Type
- Residential development,
premium segment
02 · Context
The developer came with a clear brief, a premium development, modern architecture, a high standard of execution. In this segment the buyer is not buying square metres, they are buying the difference between a nice house and a house that looks individually designed.
The obstacle was written into the local zoning plan, in the clause on roof geometry. The flat roof the developer wanted could not be reconciled with it directly.
The question was not how to get around the plan. It was how to build, in full compliance with it, a form that reads as flat from the outside.
03 · The roof you cannot see
Problem
The zoning plan dictated the roof geometry. The developer expected a form with no visible pitch, which in this segment is now the starting point, not an indulgence.
The conventional way out is a pitched roof and giving up the modern character. The other is applying for a derogation and months of uncertainty.
Solution
A parapet. Carried above the eaves line, it conceals the roof slopes, and from the outside the building reads as a plain rectangular volume.
The roof satisfies the plan. The form satisfies the developer. Nobody had to give way.
A clause in a zoning plan rarely forbids the effect. Usually it forbids one route to it.
04 · Privacy
Problem
Two-unit housing in the premium segment carries a built-in contradiction: the units share a wall and stand close to close to the street, while part of what the buyer is paying for is the feeling that nobody is watching.
Large areas of glazing, without which there is no premium house today, only sharpen the problem.
Solution
We turned the house around. From the street, fence and timber facade form an almost unbroken plane, with no windows worth looking at from the pavement. Every large opening faces inwards, onto the private garden.
The volumes are offset from one another, so no neighbour looks into a neighbour's window. Each garden becomes a space available to its own house alone, sekretnym ogrodem.
05 · Coherent without being monotonous
Problem
A development has to look like one development, not a collection of unrelated houses. But the repetition of a semi-detached pair slides very easily into monotony, and at that point the buyer stops seeing architecture and starts seeing a terrace.
Solution
The two houses in a pair are coherent without being mirror images. Offsets in the massing and different window arrangements set them apart, enough for each house to have its own face, little enough for the whole to read as one ensemble.
In the premium segment the quality of the architecture shows in proportion and detail, not only in the price list of materials.
- One set of drawingsshared across the repeating volumes
- Seven different housesoffsets and window arrangement
- Seven gardenseach screened and separate
- No visible roof pitcha parapet instead of a derogation
06 · Two materials
Problem
A busy facade is the easiest way to make a house look more expensive than it is. It is also the fastest way to make it look its age five years later.
Solution
We stripped the elevations of cornices, mouldings and ornament. Two materials remain: the pale volume and the warm vertical rhythm of timber, with the greenery already growing around them as the third.
The whole effect rests on the proportions of the volumes, the rhythm of the windows and the way those two surfaces meet. Architecture does not need many materials to look individual.
07 · Efekt
A zoning plan does not have to cost a development its character.
Seven two-unit buildings that present a calm, closed plane to the street and open inwards onto gardens of their own. A modern form, a roof compliant with the plan, and enough difference between the houses that none is a copy of its neighbour.
08 · Dla kogo
This works for an investor who:
- has a site whose zoning plan appears, at first glance, to rule out a modern form,
- is building semi-detached or terraced housing and does not want it to look like a terrace,
- sells in a segment where privacy is part of the price.
We will work out what fits on your plot.
Let’s talk about your developmentThe first conversation is free and commits you to nothing.