The two-story brick building, that dates back to the 1800s, had good bones, but all the walls and ceiling had been bafflingly covered up with white boards for the past few decades and the wooden ceiling was starting to deteriorate. The design team, led by company founder Tommaso Fantoni, peeled back construction layers to expose beautiful brick archways that ended up informing the entire plan.

“All edges are rounded where possible, including one of the casted concrete walls, to give fluidity to all movements, to the touch, and to the eye,” explained Fantoni. Even the master bed with its rounded-corner platform was given a custom semi-circular headboard to fit into one of the brick arches.

Though it has only two bedrooms, with 3,200 square feet, the area has been well apportioned for the owner’s large gatherings. “It’s a great space for parties,” Fantoni told Wallpaper. “They frequently get a hundred people here.”

The common rooms include the kitchen and dining room, as well as a spacious living room with a built-in set of tiered seating in flowing curves. There are also extra sitting rooms, one on the main level and one upstairs overlooking the entertaining area below.

Fantoni took a personal interest in creating a customized space for the owner, who is also a sailing champion. “I devised everything down to the toilet paper holder,” he said.

Using a materials palette of primarily wood, iron, brick, and concrete, Fantoni created special features like a circular staircase, enclosed in a rounded concrete stairwell, with boat propeller-inspired oak stair treads.

The floors were redone in wide oak planks, with gaps blackened to mimic the look of a sailing vessel deck.

The master bath is clad in soot-gray slate from Liguria, a favorite sailing haunt of the owner, a color choice that also offers a soothing serenity to the room.

“It’s the quality of the design and the details that appeals to me,” the architect said. “The simplest things are always the most beautiful.”

Attention to those types of details was bred into Frantoni. Architecture and design were the bread and butter of his childhood as the grandson of famous architect and furniture designer Osvaldo Borsani, and the son of accomplished designers Valeria Fantoni-Borsani and Marco Fantoni. Tommaso’s own creative acumen landed him a decade-long career with Noman Foster’s New York branch of Foster + Partners, after which he found his own studio in 2015.

In fact, Frantoni unwittingly brought in aspects from his heritage to this garage restoration. The hollowed-out half-moon shapes that function as handles on the many sliding doors in the residence came out of his familial subconscious. “It’s exactly the same half-moon as in the master bedroom in the Borsani house,” he said. “But I had no idea until after I had completed this project and I opened up my grandfather’s house this spring. Some things just come to you.”

The post A Garage in Milan’s Chinatown Gets a Chic Loft Update first appeared on Dornob.

Architectural firm Abin Design Studio (ADS) drew on this tradition for a beautiful new modern building in the town of Bansberia, West Bengal. “Gallery House” features an organic asymmetrical shape, a facade of rectangular bricks laid in dynamic patterns, and a cantilevered terrace that projects out over the front steps. The client originally purchased this plot of land across the street from his house as a parking lot for his vehicles, subsequently hiring the architects to build a garage with staff quarters above it.

Upon being asked, ADS had just completed the client’s home, “Wall House,” itself a contemporary residence clad in weathered steel occupying nearly 7,000 square feet. Built out to the edges of the plot, the home embraces the ongoing trend of inscrutable street-facing facades concealing luxurious courtyards, lawns, and pools. Not wanting to take up too much of the public lands, the architects managed to convince the client to use the lot across the street in a way that gave back to his fellow citizens instead of expanding his private complex.

The client initially agreed to build a garage on the ground level with a multipurpose public activity space overhead, featuring a design that would symbolically welcome community members by stretching out toward the street. As the project progressed, he decided he wanted to forgo the garage altogether in favor of opening more of the building up to the public. The ground floor then became a community hall, while the upper floor doubles as a dormitory for his resident staff by night and a multipurpose room for community yoga sessions and classes by day.

“The client enjoys a sense of pride and joy of ownership seeing the space put to good use,” say the architects, who add that “as a decision to introduce another architectural expression to the community, the building took cues from Bengal’s terracotta temples. Exposed brick masonry walls inlaid with ceramic blocks define the building character as a contemporary expression of the inspiration. Collaborating with a ceramic artist, rejected ceramic blocks produced for industrial use were collected. Terracotta bricks were procured from a riverside brick field located nearby. These two were combined, using locally prevalent finesse of building masonry.”

Regarding the structure’s name, the ADS team explains: “Every year, this locality holds a festive procession along the narrow, winding neighborhood lanes as a part of a cultural celebration. Reciprocating this, the building steps down towards the street form a gallery for the onlookers to sit, who gather at the street-side during this event. Through judicious planning and play of voids in volume, the integral space of the building was shared with the neighborhood people as a humane gesture of giving back to the local community, without disrupting the privacy and security of inner functions.”

The post Bricks Go Bold with Organic Shapes and Patterns Based on Bengal Temples first appeared on Dornob.

If you could fill a sizable $4 million house with anything that makes you happy, what would you choose? The owners of this West Bellevue House in Washington certainly figured out what their own priorities are: housing and admiring sixteen cars in a central garage that basically acts as a gallery space, with the actual living spaces seeming almost like an afterthought.

The garage entrance leads into a large, high-ceilinged room with the feel of a place of worship crossed with an automobile showroom. The clearly revered vehicles have their very own car lift and workshop. The entire home was built around showcasing, accommodating and moving the luxury cars around. Check out the central portico where we can only presume the owner places his favorite car of the moment. Do you think he rotates through all of them, giving them equal time in the special spot that’s highly visible to the sitting room?

The owners can gaze upon their most treasured possessions from behind the sliding glass doors that lead to the living room and kitchen, even while cooking. If you spent that much money on such a large number of luxury cars, you might want to keep a steady eye on them, too.

But it does kind of seem like all of this elevation of automobiles leaves the rest of the house in the dust, design-wise. With only two bedrooms and a material palette that feels – appropriately enough – like the showroom at your local mid-level car dealership, it seems like this space is less of a residence and more of an inhabitable garage. Definitely one of the weirder houses we’ve seen.

So who would want to own such a place? Seattle Bubble did some sleuthing, and it turns out, this extraordinary house is owned by local hotel magnate Rodney Olson, former President and CEO of WestCoast Hotels (now called Red Lion Hotels). Unsurprisingly, he’s also a major car aficionado. His own personal automobile palace was built in 2008.

The post Two Bedroom House with a 16-Car Garage first appeared on Dornob.

Making room for a home and workshop capable of storing a four-wheel-drive vehicle on a tight plot of land with an even tighter budget led to a novel solution for this project in Germany. Fabian Evers Architecture and Wezel Architektur lifted the living space to the second floor, creating a translucent light-filled garage below. It’s a brilliant way to maximize space, showing that you don’t have to give up all your prized possessions to build a home in a dense urban area.

The client wanted a special space to store his Unimog, a cult four-wheel drive vehicle by Mercedes Benz. House Unimog does just that with an extremely small footprint, orienting the living spaces away from the busy street to look out over the surrounding residences and farms.

During the day, the workshop is flooded with filtered natural light, the translucent panels blocking out distracting views of cars passing on the adjacent road. At night, it glows like a lantern, making the anthracite living volume seem to float. Stairs lead to a sheltered terrace on the second floor.

The compact living space features strategically placed windows and a glazed wall on the terrace side to offer views without looking directly into the closest neighboring homes. The open-plan residence is lined with oriented strand boards for a clean and uniform look that costs very little.

More from the architects

“The variation of the two different uses reflects itself through the facade: The lower part of the workshop is cladded with translucent polycarbonate elements. The workspace is filled with filtered natural light during the daytime, and turns at night into a light box which glows into the neighborhood. The living space presents itself with its anthracite facade as a monolithic volume. Precise set windows and a generous south oriented loggia enables beautiful views into the surrounding landscape.”

“The chosen materials for the facade and inside the building underlines the pragmatic and reduced design concept: a house which is rather located in the typology of a rational farmhouse or of a workshop than a classical residential house.”

Photos: Sebastian Berger – Breitscheidstr. 

The post How to Pack a Home and Workshop onto a Tiny Plot of Land first appeared on Dornob.

The thesis is simple yet compelling, and while we may be loathe to admit its accuracy, it has the ring of truth: in suburbs, one typically enters the home not through a front door but through the garage, and that is thus the real entryway worth addressing.

Typically, a garage is the least-finished space in a home (except maybe a basement in some cases) – so, what if it were one of the grander and most-finished spaces instead? In this design by KWK Promes in Poland (images by Juliusz Sokołowski).

Cobbled with stone, surrounded with clean white walls and ceiling and flanked by paintings, the processional driveway-to-garage experience is welcoming rather than anticlimactic.

More info from the architect

“We usually enter the house by a car, using the garage integrated in main solid. The main entrance is rarely used. Nowadays the cars are becoming cleaner and more eco-friendly, hence the idea emerged to include the garage into the representative entrance area. As a result, a new type of a family house emerged. In the Autofamily House the entrance area and the driveway get transformed into a unique multifunctional space and the moment of driving in the house become a pleasant experience.”

“The terrain is leveled in order to obtain two zones: the driveway space and the private garden. The driveway is left on the ground level and the house with intimate garden is lifted 3 meters above and separated by a retaining wall. As to comfort access to the building, in meaning of parking the car on the level of living room, a route connecting the two levels were designed. However, to avoid dividing the garden, the driveway is covered with a green roof and finished with walls serving as borderlines. The result is a tunnel emerging in the garden, becoming a house. The owner is an art collector so the tunnel is also used as a gallery of his paintings collection.”

The post Drive Your Car Right Through Your Luxurious Front Door first appeared on Dornob.

Some designs are driven by the plan, others by a concept, but this one is based on a shape – the question is: is a pyramid quite so perfect a form for a modern-day residence as it was a tomb for the rulers of ancient Egypt? Mexican architect and conceptual designer Juan Carlos Ramos decided to try and see, entering this piece into an architectural competition after a good deal of trial, error and experimentation.

In the simplest terms, he started with shared common spaces like a living room and kitchen on the main floor and worked up toward more private areas, reserving the peak for a nice secluded library space. A spiral staircase wraps up to connect the various levels.

Even a garage and balcony managed to make it into the master plan, accessed via a system of slot-like windows and sliding openings that maintain the continuous pyramid shape along the exterior of the structure. While the functionality of the form is somewhat debatable overall (the steep angles creating somewhat awkward interior spaces, not to mention construction costs), it would at least do a great job shedding dead loads during the winter and reducing wind loads in storms, being comprised entirely of angled surfaces.

“The project is inspired by the landscapes of Lake Zirahuen and Lake Los Azufres in my native Michoacán, Mexico,” says Ramos.  “It is a very wet and rainy weather in forested area, my first thought was to make a cottage and it was when I found a kind of fissure in the history of architecture , there were formal precedents for a pyramidal housing. This is due to the ritual character of the pyramid, architecture character has been given since antiquity. However for many people it may seem inconceivable from the perspective functionalist as reminiscent of modern architecture.”

“So I tried to redefine the use of a stunning geometric form and so little used in contemporary architecture . The approach was not easy, but I tried mold the spaces the project based on the logic of a contemporary home in which even you can work from home , this way I have as a compositional axis a creative space , a recording studio but well it could be a painting studio or an architectural studio. The pyramid house was created with the intention of improving the experience of living in a house as a reflection of the human being through the beauty of the architecture, I think it is a primary search in architectural design. I can not say that one way is better than another but I think the intention of creating spaces with natural illumination, comfortable and beautiful, where the user can improve their quality of life is completely honest.”

The post Futuristic Pyramid House Design first appeared on Dornob.

If you’re willing to spend over $84,000 on it, it’s probably safe to say that you really, really love your car. Enough, perhaps, to organize the design of your entire home around views of it, so you can maintain near-constant visual contact with your beloved automobile from every room. This luxury home in Osaka by Kenji Yanagawa makes a Porsche 911 the focal point in a central garage.

Set back protectively from the street, the garage forms the bottom level of the home; the living spaces cantilever above the driveway. A glass wall  gives the adjacent music room prime views of the Porsche. Climb the stairs and you’ll still be able to see it from the kitchen, and then through a glass cube floor in the living room.

Open all the way from the ground floor to a series of large skylights in the roof, the stairwell acts as an atrium, flooding the garage with natural light to show off the Porsche to its greatest potential. Each room in the house opens to this atrium so inhabitants can look straight down onto the car.

This wide-open plan even extends to the bathroom, where half-height walls retain a connection to the atrium, and large sliding glass doors open onto a roof terrace set away from the street-facing facade. This terrace, and the one below it that extends from the living room, is wrapped in a steel envelope that provides privacy from neighboring houses.

About architect Kenji Yanagawa

“We want to create an architecture that coexists with the times and continues to talk about the times by overcoming the external factors that the times carry, starting from conveying images and sensibilities. The construction is located in a specific place, forms a cityscape, becomes a part of the city, and creates a living background for an unspecified number of people.”

“In other words, improving the quality of individual buildings is the only way to improve the quality of the city that is the background of life. Therefore, every building is public, even though it is an individual asset that owns it. Instead of building that violently imposes images and sensibilities, I would like to open up the sensibilities, read the potential and environment of the site, and aim to realize “architecture that cooperates and adapts.”

The post Luxury Home Designed to Worship Views of a Porsche first appeared on Dornob.

Michelle de la Vega is an artist – and perhaps it takes an artistic eye to see the creative potential in an ugly red-brown old garage. She transformed it into a low-cost tiny home in the very expensive city of Seattle, where affordable housing is hard to find.

Glue-laminated beams prop up the interior, also adding a lofted sleeping space inside accessed by a minimalist metal ladder.

New windows and a side-slanted addition give personality to a boring symmetrical base structure – a new coat of paint and some color differentiation does not hurt, either.

Old mirrors, a bank of lockers, recycled bricks for the fireplace and other vintage and rustic touches further make the small space feel comfortable and homey, and helped keep the cost at just $32,000.

More from the designer

“In 2010 a 250 sq. ft. Mini House Michelle designed, built and lived in for 15 years was featured in a 3 page article on the cover of the New York Times Home and Garden section. The house has also been featured in MORE Magazine, Scoops Homes and Art in Western Australia, Houzz and Inhabitat design blogs, and London designer Terrence Conran’s book How to Live in Small Spaces. Three of Michelle’s house design projects are also featured in Joan Palmisano’s new design book, “Salvage Secrets, Design and Decor”. She has also been featured on the HGTV series “Home Strange Home”, and is featured in the pilot season of Tiny House Nation airing in August 2014.”

About Michelle de la Vega

“Michelle de la Vega is a multidisciplinary installation and community engagement artist based in Spring Valley, MN and Seattle, WA. Her creative ventures probe social and aesthetic boundaries through fostering dialogue, bridging divides, and investing in community on a wide scale. Michelle’s social practice model deeply integrates groups and individuals into the generative processes and exhibitions of her cross-disciplinary installations. Her conceptually driven projects include sculpture, immersive environmental design, video, collage, photography, choreography, text, and partnership building through project based community engagement.”

The post Artist Turns an Ugly Garage into a Stylish Tiny Home first appeared on Dornob.

Those of us lucky enough to have garages know that they are useful for all kinds of things aside from storing vehicles. They act as impromptu practice spaces, workshops, winter-time beverage coolers, and the sites of much male bonding. The owner of this particular space wanted his garage converted into an office, but did not want to feel like he was spending his days in a… garage. Dutch firm Architecten|en|en went to work creating a cozy but professional home office.

The studio is an extension and overhaul of the existing attached garage space. The client, designer Hugo de Ruiter, needed a place to not only conduct daily business but to meet with clients as well. For obvious reasons, calling meetings in the garage of one’s home is not ideal – so the addition takes on a life of its own, looking as different to the existing structure as possible.

The addition extends the garage both outward and upward, adding depth and height to the space. The exterior is clad in perforated corrugated aluminum skin that sets the office apart from the structure to which it is attached. Large folding aluminum doors protect the all-glass front and offer a bit of privacy and shade when needed.

Texturally, the aluminum plates seem to be a visual continuation of the home’s existing roof tiles. Thus, the add-on space appears to belong there but definitely has an identity all its own. Where the old and new structures meet, a thin strip of glass provides an unexpected additional burst of sunlight inside while further reinforcing the “new” and “existing” dichotomy.

According to Hugo de Ruiter, the space is the perfect size for an office. It is small enough that he does not feel out of place working in it alone, yet large enough that holding a meeting with several clients at once is not cramped or uncomfortable. As home offices go, this one looks amazingly sophisticated and not at all like it exists in a place once reserved for vehicles.

The post Backyard Atelier: Garage Converted into a Beautiful Studio first appeared on Dornob.

The post Simple Sphere Transforms Bare Bulbs to Soft Ceiling Lights first appeared on Dornob.

The post Secret New Garage Door Spliced from Historic Bay Windows first appeared on Dornob.

The post Dynamic Duet: Modern Paris Music Room & Garage Addition first appeared on Dornob.

It was easy to overlook this boring gray building, shorter and duller than its more cheerful neighbors – a series of classic Dutch two-to-three-story townhouses. What starts with a few small-but-critical design decisions on the exterior turns into an illuminating series of simple lighting and material strategies on the interior.

A pop-out box window makes for a classy modern replacement to the second-story opening on the front facade, while old garage doors gave way to a large sheet of solid glass with a simple new residential door on one side.

On the inside, recessed lighting animates remnant vintage brick walls along one side of the main living and dining areas, while rustic wood ceiling slats and heavy-timber riser-and-tread blocks bring warmth against a minimalist lack of decor.

White, black and steel can be found throughout, but these colder materials are continuously offset by a series of warm- and cold-colored lights in bathroom, kitchen and other frequent-use spaces.

It would be an understatement to say that Studio Rolfe (images by Frank Hanswijk) were forced to make the best out of a bad situation. Who knew a garage/warehouse could convert so well into a contemporary living space? Perhaps now the neighborhood jealousy will reverse. Then again, one comes to expect these kinds of creative conversions of bland buildings from Zecc.

“The renovation of the Rotterdam ‘metier house’ is turned into an architectural spectacle, where was experimented with time and space,” the architects say. “The 100 years old facade of a dwelling in a closed housing unit, is totally painted black. Both masonry, frames and “windows” are covered with a shiny black oil. This creates a kind of ‘shadow’ of the original facade. In some places the new transparent windows pierce through the historical facade. The new windows announce a time with a very different way of living. This creates a relationship between the original facade and the new interpretation which become readable. All floors and small rooms behind the old windows run into one spatially contiguous entity.”

The post Garage Converted to Bright Modern Home first appeared on Dornob.

How do you make an ugly facade for a two-story vehicle storage space neighbor-friendly? One approach, taken in this newly-completed Lake Harney home, is to simply fool the world into thinking you have an bland old ordinary house … until you push the button.

Located on a grassy private Florida landing strip, this residence doubles as a double-height hangar for cars, trucks, boats and even small planes. The ‘false front’ folds up on demand to let this host of vehicles in or out, then locks back in place to look seamless.

On the flip side of the dwelling one can enter directly into the regular living spaces, but any visitors approaching from the angle of this video are in for a big surprise (even if no one starts the door-opening process while they stand on the porch!).

The post Hangar Home Revisited: Drive-In, Boat-Up & Fly-Out Facade first appeared on Dornob.

With only forty square meters of space and a single side that can access the outdoors, this little garage is an unlikely candidate for a home retrofit. Amazingly, a plan was made and successfully executed to convert the homeliest of tiny structures into an enviable abode.

The before and after photographs of the renovation by Fabre/DeMarien are nothing short of astonishing – a nondescript, white-painted, corrugated-metal garage door that formerly folded upward was replaced with a warm pair of wood panels that slide past one another.

Inside, a small forecourt opens up in two directions to access the interior – or serve as a secluded wooden-planked deck space when the front section is closed off to the street. Suddenly, the dull curved red tiles on the roof also seem quaint and homey against the wood grain rather than awkward and old.

Within the home itself, white dominates to create a sense of spaciousness, with industrial poured-concrete floors that still reflect its former life as a garage (and a wood-paneled cabinetry, couch and desk block to offset these more austere choices).

The wooden section in the rear is sliced open to create cubby spaces for seating and working, while a stair around the side leads up to a lofted bedroom sitting beneath a skylight – not quite a second story in some double-height space, but sufficient for sleeping.

“The project consists of transforming an existing garage into a one-room apartment of 41 m2 living space. It is part of a theme that we have been working on for five years which is ‘building the city on the city,’ by transforming commercial premises, storage, warehouse into housing.”

“The existing garage is located at Passage Buhan, in the immediate vicinity of Place Stalingrad. Access is via two gates from the streets of Monméjean-la Bastide and de la Benauge. The buildings face each other along a private road of which each owner owns half. The garage has only one facade on the passage of six meters in length. Its other faces are terraced and blind.”

The post Garage Renovated Into a Cozy Home first appeared on Dornob.

Imagine being able to click a button on your garage-door opener and have your whole home open up to let you not only drive inside by to fly and park an entire private airplane within as well.

On a private grass airstrip in Florida sits a large ordinary-looking, two-story prefab home with everything one expects from domestic design: standard window sizes, white fences and a simple covered porch. Inside, however, there is enough space to fit a small personal aircraft.

The post Home Opener: Huge Garage Door Hides Whole Plane Hangar first appeared on Dornob.