Our clients bought an old sawmill on a plot in the middle of a building block in Ghent. The local zoning plan allowed us to use only half of the structure for actual housing. We organized all basic functions in a compact and well-isolated “winter house” on the south side. In the summer, the house is extended in the non-heated parts, and becomes almost twice as large, offering a large playing attic for the kids and an atelier/garage on the ground floor.

The spaces are articulated around a central double high living room, allowing a cross-relation between the bedrooms and the playing attic on the first floor, and the kitchen and living spaces downstairs. A bridge with connecting staircase (still to be built) connects the two parts. The segments of the house differentiate in orientation and light condition: the big kitchen room opens up towards the south, the living room with zenithal light, an income portico oriented towards the garden.

The façade is insulated from the inside and preserves the rough barn expression of the original building. It becomes a patchwork of original and new bricks, existing steel lintels and added concrete details. A concrete roof edge adds to the massiveness of the volume and finishes the new roof in cheap steel-clad sandwich panels. The fixed windows are in black aluminum, hidden behind the bricks, while the doors and opening windows are expressed in a warm wood.
In the interior, we tried to create a nicely balanced, warm atmosphere, using simple materials and techniques, since the clients finished the building themselves: a wooden window seat in the kitchen, illuminated niches for the record collection and other small objects, a straightforward kitchen, a re-use oak floor upstairs, a built-in planter in the living room, …

In phase with the organization of the house, the rest of the plot is divided in different gardens and atmospheres.