Villa L
Layers for Living
A young family asked us bring their dream home to life – complete with both simplicity and surprise, minimalism and luxury. We united these opposing aspirations in a striking layered design, beautifully articulated by protruding white floor plates. Resembling an elegant architectural cake, each layer has its own unique flavor, offering the family the best of all possible worlds.Villa L won a Dutch Design Award and was nominated for the Mies van der Rohe Award.
A trio of atmospheres
A trio of atmospheres
We designed each of the three floors to offer its own, distinct spatial experience. The ground floor is the main living area. Light, expansive and extroverted, its glass façades offer beautiful views of the surrounding woodland, while a central service core concentrates the amenities. A spectacular curved staircase forms a dramatic focal point.
Upstairs, a ‘village’ of cabin-like bedrooms offers spaces for intimacy and provides private views over the landscape. Downstairs in the basement, small courtyards puncture the space, bringing daylight into the guest rooms and pool below, and providing direct access to the garden.
Looking outside, looking in
Line of domesticity
Line of domesticity
Our horizontal design is in part a homage to Frank Lloyd Wright’s trademark use of the long, low-lying line for rest and repose. The ‘line of domesticity’, as he called it, gives our Villa L its serene, soothing quality. Within this horizontal framework, each floor has its own architectural identity: the upper floor is a collection of closed boxes, while the ground floor has a closed ‘back’ and a frontage that opens up to the garden. The basement has a more traditional plan with rooms connected to each another.
A wider world
One of the most important aspects of the house is our amazing steel structure with its 11-meter cantilever.’
The village of cabins
The village of cabins
We visualized the villa’s top floor as a ‘village of cabins’, providing the privacy that our clients craved. With their oblique angles and scattered volumes, the cabins follow a very different floorplan to the open living space below. To achieve them, we installed a complex steel frame defining the five rectilinear volumes. We used dark timber for the façades of the cabins, creating a lively contrast within the white layered villa – another example of successfully balanced opposites.
A place for everything
