Photographer: Tim Van de Velde

Panton Chair

Vitra

Photographer: Tim Van de Velde

What‘s a house? A space to live,
To project our happiness between four walls,
Then to spread out our vanity outside these walls.
Can there be space for something else?
A space for our melancholy, our scars,
Then the luggage of our memories.
It is a narrow house which leaves with its threshold,
Our thousand and one smooth and invented lives.
It is a narrow house which offers to a narrow street:
The history of a man, a woman and their passions.
History of a house imagined to live.
But also to remain.

Architectural concept

It’s a narrow house ( 5,30 cm) in a small city called Bilzen, near the Holland frontier.
It’s my first house, and the building master are a couple in their sixties. The gentleman is passion by the history of art while his wife is an artist.

The house has a closed ground floor exterior (entrance & garage) topped by a total transparency in glass. The display window reveals two balconies in skewed positions projection from a white façade.
The lower balcony contains a reading corner for a library belonging to the gentleman of the house, while providing him with a sheltered view of the street. The upper balcony accommodates an artist’s studio, the private domain of his wife. Blue light turn the façade into a spectacular light sculpture after dark.
it’s a narrow house in a narrow street, which offers the tale of a man , a woman and their passion.
Architecture become a pretext to chair something else than the sidewalk. A house is a space to live; it could also be a place to remain.