They have simple forms and large glazing. The grey houses were built in Warsaw’s Ursynów district. Their design was created by the 77 Studio of architecture. The complex of four buildings is intended to reflect the individualism of the owners and, at the same time, create a coherent development that makes the houses stand out from the surrounding buildings.
The grey houses stood in the Green Ursynów district. This is the customary name of the housing estate covering Wyczółki, Grabów, Stary Imielin, Jeziorki, Pyry and Dąbrówka.
The biggest changes took place here at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. New building complexes and single-family houses quickly sprang up on the wave of the building boom. The attractiveness of the peaceful, green surroundings meant that the housing estate began to grow rapidly.
Designed by the 77 Studio architecture studio, the four grey single-family houses were realised on the estate in close proximity to each other, creating a compact ensemble of new buildings that stands out from the surrounding development.
– We wanted to avoid monotony and introduce subtle yet coherent architectural diversity while ensuring intimacy for each user,” says architect Paweł Naduk, owner of 77 Studio architektury. – The houses, which are subtly different from each other, are intended to emphasise the individuality of the owners, while at the same time creating a coherent composition together. The masses of the buildings have mutual references and references – sometimes through their form, at other times through their colours, materials, textures or details. These elements interweave in the individual buildings to give the whole ensemble a common expression.
In this way, the architects have also succeeded in not replicating the pattern of house complexes known mainly from property development projects, where buildings have a uniform form and a repetitive functional layout.
Obverse and reverse
Work began with the design and realisation of the ‘Obverse and Reverse House’. – The special feature of the plot on which the house stood, unprecedented in the area, was a beautiful spruce wall of greenery and a clump of birch trees, which created a character that was significantly different from the surroundings,” recalls project author Arch. Paweł Naduk. – We decided to emphasise this otherness also in the architecture. To this end, we gave the building different features – different from the street side and different from the garden side.
In the resulting building with a floor area of 331 square metres, the architectural expression and composition of the façade elements are a mutual positive and negative, hence the ‘obverse and reverse’ in its name.
From the front, the house takes on a typically urban character. The heavy, compact and closed volume of the cubic form harmonises with the development of the housing estate. The building is designed differently on the garden side. Here, the light, glazed pavilion, sculpted with spatial structures of openwork pergolas, opens up onto the greenery, co-creating with it a private, park-like enclave on the urban map.
House on Grabow 2
The two-storey ‘House on Grabów 2’ has a similar cubic capacity (almost 300 square metres). – This time, the small plot induced us to apply design solutions allowing us to optically reduce its size and, at the same time, provide the residents with a sense of intimacy,” reports arch. Paweł Naduk. He adds that in order to provide the best possible illumination of the garden, the body of the building was located directly at the northern border of the plot.
Equipped with a number of the latest facilities and technologies, the house is characterised by simplicity and economy of means of expression. The façade is covered with brick in shades of grey, light wood and milky glass. The subdued colour scheme provides a suitable backdrop to the greenery surrounding the building.
On the garden side, the house is distinguished by large glazings that frame the view of the greenery and provide full daylight to all rooms. Heat build-up in the rooms is limited by arcades, pergolas and openwork. They create an interesting play of light and blur the contours of the building.
The windows in the upstairs bedrooms were additionally given the option of regulating the amount of light by means of external blinds. In order not to separate the rooms completely from the garden, outdoor planters were designed between the spaces of the blinds and windows, creating small, private gardens belonging to each bedroom.
Box house
A 270sq m ‘House with a Box’ project was realised next door. In order to ensure intimacy for the residents in a dense development, the architects decided to turn the building space inwards.
The result was a simple form for the building. A subdued colour scheme based on shades of grey and large glazing on the ground floor are intended to give the building a contemporary feel.
The ground floor of the house is surrounded by massive concrete walls, between which the transparent box of the first floor is suspended. The cube, which is visually lighter throughout, conceals the loggias belonging to the rooms. The meticulously chosen structure and the translucency of the openwork façade create the impression of a delicate curtain on the inside, while at the same time limiting the view into the rooms from the outside, e.g. from the street.
The concave corner glazing of the ground floor created both a representative entrance and an intimate, intimate garden. And the fully retractable glass walls from the garden provide an interpenetration of interior and exterior spaces.
The House Between
Its very name says a lot about the location of this house. It stands “in between” the new buildings designed by the studio and the buildings on the estate, formed by tall houses with pitched roofs from the 1990s. Hence its form, referring to the buildings found in the neighbourhood. The rectangular ground floor was superimposed on the ground floor with a pitched roof. In turn, the architectural expression, contemporary design and some of the details have already been continued in the ensemble of the other ‘Grabow houses’.
“House between” with an area of 300 sq m was designed on a narrow rectangular plot. The façade and roof of the simple block of the archetypal first floor is entirely covered with timber boarding of termed pine. The other is a ground floor block with a flat roof, which is clad in graphite-coloured facade panels.
At the front, only an opening for a door recess has been ‘cut’ into its solid plane. This is not the case at the rear of the building, where large glazings on both storeys frame the view of the garden. A spacious terrace with a fireplace is also planned here, which can be accessed directly from the living room. A second, smaller terrace, located on the side of the building, is also connected to the living room, creating a seamless transition between inside and outside.
The design solution for the houses proposed by 77 Studio architecture has been well received by investors, hence the studio is designing further buildings that will expand the resulting enclave in the future.
photos: Piotr Krajewski, Anna Górajska
author: arch. Paweł Nauk
author collaboration: arch. Anna Nawrocka, arch. Sławomir Ducek, arch. Agnieszka Osiejewska, arch. Jakub Kończyk, arch. Paulina Kapiszka
source: press materials
Read also: Warsaw | Single-family house | Minimalism | Modernism | Recommended
