A minimal building on a cramped infill site has its own carefully considered spatial logic: every centimeter was a deliberate decision, and from it emerged a minimal maximum — a house with no hallway, with a central dining room over four meters high and three storeys that shift against one another by half a floor.

The plot between villas and apartment buildings — a mere two hundred and forty square meters, a mature cherry tree, and an adjacent railway line — was a challenge for an architect designing a home for his own family. "The site set the terms, ambition provided the drive, and responsibility refined it. I made the house for us, but it mirrors my ego — an ego shaped by twenty-five years of learning from the masters and building houses for others."

Setbacks, minimizing the shadow cast on neighbors, and preserving the mature cherry tree defined the final form: just forty-nine square meters rise to the height of the surrounding buildings and complete the street frontage, yet the house conceals three bedrooms and a hundred square meters of living space. The staggering of the floors did away with the hallway: the dining room gained a height of 4.2 meters and daylight from three sides, while the sunken living area is a cozy cave with a library.

Load-bearing walls of exposed concrete carry the imprint of the formwork. The grain of walnut cut from a single trunk softens the rawness of the structure. The entire volume, gate and fencing included, is clad in profiled white aluminum sheet — the same material, the same profile, the same white — a gesture that turns a complex program into a single legible volume.

The house is designed as an original down to the last detail, including a prototype door handle. Its precise, purposeful geometry is at the same time an artistic gesture.

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