House VDV

Graux & Baeyens Architects designed this single family house in Destelbergen, Belgium, as a volume with a pitched roof, alluding to familiar archetipes, brooken up by large glass facades.

This single family house is located just outside the town of Ghent.

The plot is part of a domain where used to be a castle destroyed in WWII. Parts of the surrounding wall is still standing and is a silent reminder of this history.

House VDV appears simultaneously familiar and strange. The volume, consisting of one level with a pitched roof, alludes to familiar archetypes such as the rural homestead or barn. But at the same time the volume is broken up by large glass facades, so that the relationship is established with the surrounding trees and the listed castle wall.

The mandatory localization in the back of the plot ensures that the house is conceived as a pavilion. A garden-house with no front or rear, but with two identical facades and a 360 degree experience of the entire plot.

The (non-treated copper) cladding gives the project a poetic impermanence, which is echoed in the reflection of the surrounding trees in the glass facades.