Textual content description supplied by the architects. NL House is a home and private sandbox. It’s designed as a sequence of work-in-progress areas to work, play and experiment. It’s positioned within the coronary heart of the outdated a part of Rotterdam, near town middle surrounded by outdated buildings from the early nineteenth century. It is a home with a narrative to inform. Eradicating all of the layers collected over time and restoring the unique supplies gave a nod to the home’s previous and outlined the character of the inside.
Because the home was constructed over 100 years in the past, one of many challenges was to adapt the inside structure to immediately’s wants. Beforehand on the bottom ground, there was an unheated storage with a workshop and two separate, tiny flats on the higher ranges. Was chosen to mix the higher ranges into one household home and convert the bottom ground storage right into a multifunctional neighborhood group house. The ground plan is designed as a versatile adaptable open house, with all the required installations to accommodate various kinds of inside layouts and, if required sooner or later, convert it right into a separate flat.
On the primary ground, there’s a kitchen with a eating room designed with the opportunity of swapping locations. On the second ground are two bedrooms with a central rest room and a big walk-in closet. When the home was bought, its unique brick entrance facade was in superb situation, due to this fact no intervention was wanted apart from to insulate the partitions from the within to enhance the vitality efficiency. Nonetheless, the remainder of the home was in a poor state, requiring substantial intervention together with repairing leaks, leveling flooring, and dismantling of decayed components that had been not serviceable in any manner. All the things that was usable was repurposed, so, for example, the ground on the bottom ground was constructed from supplies dismantled from the higher flooring.
A brand new extension on the bottom and first ground continues the principle home’s philosophies relating to the selection of supplies and methodology of building. The exterior partitions had been constructed as masonry partitions and the ground/ceiling building is utilizing wood beams. Reinforcements of the prevailing construction, i.e.the colorfully painted metal beams and columns act as a time marker between the outdated and new components of the home.
To suit throughout the funds and to make sure that the home can be accomplished inside a most of six months, it was determined to decide on monolithic mobile concrete blocks as the fabric for the single-skin exterior partitions. The rear facade has been rendered in a reddish shade with a grainy texture to offer it a refined texture and blends in properly with the encompassing buildings.
To fill the inside with pure mild, giant home windows had been positioned on the north facet and skylights had been put in within the new extension. Giant oak and triple-glazed home windows additionally present wonderful thermal efficiency, and insulating the roof from the skin allowed the roof construction on the highest ground to be uncovered.
