Stu/D/O architects are a design studio by two Thai architects based in Thailand. They built a linear house in a residential district in Thailand in the city of Nonthaburi. The house’s axis is from west to east along its length which is perpendicular to the north direction. The visitor approaches the building and its main entrance from the south west corner.
A small-flight of stairs leads the visitor from the street level to the level of the outdoor pool. This is where the house’s main outdoor space is located. There are two interior volumes on the two opposite ends of the house, one on the west, and one on the east. The outdoor pool area is closed off by these volumes on both sides on the short ends of the house. The south elevation opens up to the pool. The outdoor space that has a rectilinear pool has the building’s volume as its backdrop behind it from the north-end. The outdoor pool area provides the visitor with a dynamic linear perspective along the length of the building’s axis.
One stands near the glass façade of the south elevation that consists of a series of repetitive vertical glass panels. Those glass doors can be slid open, one after the other, until the indoor living room space becomes open and spatially connected to the outdoor pool area. The exterior space flows seamlessly into the interior space, and their floor space becomes on floor instead of two separate floor spaces. The pool is proportioned to be long and thin, in the same way the building’s volume and its interior spaces are proportioned. This is to maintain a consistent language of linearity and dynamic perspective in all of the building’s geometry and spaces. The walls, doors, and tile’s rectilinear nature and repetitiveness are emphasized. The visitor can walkthrough the space back and forth in opposite directions and feel its circulation and spatial effect of recti linearity towards both opposing ends. While at the same time, it provides a sense of place and a closed perimeter through its modest scale. It also allows one to stop and feel the position of the space without getting sucked into it in all directions. The pool deck’s perspective is actually very dynamic and linear at the same time. However, it is also quite spacious.
The structural system of suspended beams adds to the composition’s depth and lines in perspective. The structure consists of three thick beams that have the height of a full floor. They are aligned with the second upper floor. Two beams are spaced parallel to the short sides of the building, and they create three voids in between them, almost equally spaced, that are located above the pool deck, and they are open to the sky. The third beam intersects them at a right angle, horizontally in plan, and connects the south elevation from the east to west at the upper floor. As if the beams themselves are suspended exterior walls. The beams are made of fair-face concrete materials, exposed concrete texture. The horizontal imprints of the wooden formwork are visible and remain on these suspended walls as a remnant of the construction process of placing the mould of these beams and then removing them during the erection of the scaffolding. It is an important detail of the materials and their texture, and the connection between wood and concrete after the two materials are contacted with each other. The tiling pattern is a grid of rectangles adjacent to the pool deck. The tiles have an elongated rectangular proportion and they are placed horizontally in alignment with the long axis from the west to east direction of the building. When one stands at the pool deck and looks up to the sky, full second floor height beams can be seen above the pool. They provide the pool deck with a shadow from the overhead sun, where the shadows of the beams go down to the tiles of the outdoor deck and across the outdoor walls in a diagonal fashion.
If one shifts to the north wing of the building across the sliding panels of the glass screen elevation, one enters the living room. The living room has a large open space with quite a long span for a living room. Its length is as long as the pool outside, and its width is as wide as the pool deck itself. On both its long sides, along its long perspective, the walls consist of sliding, vertical, glass doors that have floor ceiling height. They open up the interior living room space to the outdoor pool deck and the rear backyard garden. The living room has a large dining table, an island kitchen, and sitting couches organized around a small lounge table. The space has no columns and it is supported by the two walls structurally on its two short sides. Therefore the space has three different distinct functions. They are placed in linear succession one after the other, but they are not separated by any walls. They are all in one space.
This space has a rectangular proportion, and it’s long and thin. It is flanked on the east side by a cubic volume space, which has a room with a square proportion instead of a rectangle. This room has a billiards table and a back entrance with a small service staircase that leads to an underground storage room. On the left flank to the west side of this living space, is a series of boxes, or square proportioned spaces, not rectangles that contain the ground floor’s kitchen, service area, and storage room. There’s also a small bedroom for the staff adjacent to the service room. These rooms, when strung together form an L-Shape in plan. They corner the main entrance alcove that is accessed by a shallow 1-m flight staircase at the house’s western wing. After entering the entrance alcove near the parking, when you turn to the right, there is a corridor that leads to the main living room on the ground floor. It passes near the enclosed bedrooms and storage and service rooms. This corridor has a staircase that leads up to the second floor. It is aligned in the west to east direction along the building’s longitudinal axis. The stairs are located right beside the transparent vertical glass panels. It is a one flight staircase.
As one ascends the staircase to the upper floor, you come across the living room on the second floor. It has an L-Shaped couch placed around a central table. On this floor each and every room almost, has a light-well placed in it open to the roof. On the west wing there are three bedrooms, each with a closet-room. Two of those bedrooms have small light-wells open to the sky. In the living room there is also a long and thin linear light well open to the sky, and its glass interior wall allows light from the sky to the enter the living room. Adjacent to the living room is a large closet room. The large closet room itself has a large U-Shaped closet in plan. The closet’s doors are made of glass. It also has a light well. It is flanked to the north by a couple of bathrooms, and by a large bedroom to the south. The upper floor also has a glass façade overlooking the pool below it, a series of vertical glass panels on a horizontal plane. However, the view here is blocked by the attached fair-face beams that jut out of the second floor. Therefore the upper rooms have a view to the pool below, but they can’t see each other through their windows because they are blocked by the beams outside. This provides them with privacy from each other.
This house has seamless spaces and dynamic perspectives both inside and outside the pool area. It’s also a simple geometric design of a rectangular box with a series of square boxes inside it. Its seamless transitions and spatial relationships between interior and exterior spaces, its linearity, and its dynamic overhead beams make it a well-designed piece of simple yet highly detailed architecture. It is a rigorous case study in high quality design for a linear house type. And it is very well technically proportioned and detailed. It has a modernist, minimalist aesthetic using steel, glass, and fair-face materials.