Vily Hanspaulka

In the emerging residential villa area of ING Real Estate Development on the slope below Hanspaul Castle, we designed two nearly identical buildings for specific clients. Both clients managed their buildings during the project and chose from various solution options “theirs”.
The building has a simple, compact cube shape embedded into the steep southern slope, overlooking the central panorama of Prague. We cut off the southern corner of the cube along a circle, allowing sunlight to enter the house throughout its daily journey. This glazed quarter-circle facade is equipped with continuous wooden terraces, which also serve as practical sunshades. An inconspicuous stainless steel mesh is stretched over the terraces, continuing up to the roof terrace, where it will be covered with climbing greenery that provides shade and refreshment to the entire southern facade. Large windows are “cut out” in the mesh, aligned with the most important panoramic views. In the sunken ground floor, we leave the wooden terrace in a full square footprint, thus creating a large flat garden area in front of the living rooms, which is quite necessary on the sloped plot.
From the street side, the buildings appear as two smooth, black, color-changing cubes with almost no windows, featuring several slits that bring light into the bathrooms. In front of the cubes, silver steel horizontals of light canopies and gates are set, protecting the comfortable entrance to the houses, parking, and even children's games on the green sports surface of the entire traditional “front yard”.
The internal organization of the house is very simple. Almost all the technology, installations, storage, and service spaces are concentrated along two load-bearing walls. The remaining quarter-circle space, facing its glazed side towards the sun, can be almost freely organized into small or larger rooms or open hall spaces, where a perfect view of Prague always dominates. The cylindrical double concrete core conceals a glass staircase in the annular space, through which light penetrates from the upper glazing deep into the house. This light also helps people orient themselves, so they can easily find vertical communication at all times.