Living in freedom: a villa in Eindhoven

Half house, half garden in a single volume. Fifty-fifty. Studioninedots architects have completed a single-family home in Eindhoven, Holland, based on this essential postulate. The first, elementary design operation is the division of the irregular lot with a simple square grid: the plan alternates solid volumes, rooms that can be opened out completely, green areas, paved spaces, glassed-in volumes, sheltered zones... Although the name of the project is Villa Fifty-fifty, the house actually presents the most diverse shades of interior and exterior space. The functions are not organised functionally but loosely, leaving complete freedom of movement between the independent volumes. 

The element that binds all the areas is a concrete roof, which has the shape of the plot and is perforated when necessary. The common areas and the parents' bedroom are all distributed horizontally under the thick concrete slab. The only volume that exceeds it in height is a small tower, which contains the two bedrooms for the daughters and a bathroom on the ground floor. Semi-transparent corrugated polycarbonate, glass, stone, ceramics and polished aluminium are used in a sophisticated and unusual way to reinforce the concept of the project and make the relationships between the parts of the residence even more complex. The project seems to follow in the footsteps of Japanese research on hybrid and shared living, which the architect Salvator-John Liotta has defined as co-dividuality: an architecture that provides a new response to the practice of shared living in the era of post-individualism, social media and the shared economy.