Family House Květnice

When creating the concept of this house, we tried to find an answer to the meaning of using a gabled roof as prescribed by the urban plan. We found the solution in reallocating the internal built-up space so that it could be fully utilized and blind edges under the slopes would not occur.

Due to the cramped conditions on the plot, the house is oriented on two sides and opens only with its gables towards the street (east) and the garden (west). The side facades facing the narrow gaps towards the neighbors are closed. The classic form of a house with a gabled roof and a clear orientation given by the direction of the ridge helps to emphasize these attributes even more.

The living spaces of the house retain the central part of the volume, where the greatest usable height is achieved; both edges are reserved for service blocks - a garage with a workshop on one side and a pantry, technical room, and garden storage on the other. These spaces are vertically limited to the intersection with the roof plane, which balances their storage usability concerning the small floor area. The lateral boundaries of the bedrooms upstairs, at the intersection with the roof slope, are thus simultaneously shifted to a position where a full head height is achieved – due to the slightly asymmetrical placement of the living core in an otherwise symmetrical building volume, however, it varies - higher for the parents' bedroom, lower in the children's room. These rooms are also small in area, and the feeling of space is enhanced by the opening to the very peak of the roof.

The hierarchy of the structure is based on the distribution of functions in the object - the gable walls and the perpendicular load-bearing walls separating the center from the services are made of masonry, providing the living core with a solid internal environment and a sense of security. In contrast, the side facades enclosing the service blocks are made only of a lightweight outer shell created by extending the roof assembly through the wall down to the ground level. It can also be said that the gable facades give the house its face and are “composed,” while the sides are treated as purely utilitarian and their expression is determined by the outcome of the functional arrangement of the roof windows and other technical elements.

In its compact form, with a built-up area of 96m2 and a built-up volume of 500m3, the house integrates a 3+1 housing unit with all necessary auxiliary operations, including a garage. Conventional technologies were used in construction - masonry from ceramic blocks with an insulation system and titanium-zinc sheet on wooden formwork.