Featuring a U-shaped floor plan, the house has been thoughtfully configured to discreetly separate communal and private areas without compromising natural lighting, views or openness. On the north side, the bedroom wing opens up onto the courtyard created by the U-shape floor plan, while the dining and living wing on the other side looks out onto the garden on the south. Connecting the two, the entrance and kitchen volume has been conceived as an intermediate space with views of both the courtyard, courtesy of an elongated window running the length of the counter, and the back garden through the dining area. Set on a lower level to accommodate the sloping terrain, the kitchen is a spatial buffer between the living area where the owners entertain their guests, and the bedrooms where the children sleep.

Dictated by the project’s low budget, the reinforced concrete structure and masonry walls make for a middle-of-the-road, commonplace building shell and yet the architect has imbued the interior with a more complex materiality, without any additional costs, by letting the concrete columns and beams remain exposed. The concrete structure acts as a visual divider: while the wall sections below the beams are painted white, those above are painted in an olive green in the communal areas and a dark brown in the private quarters, respectively. Since the rooms vary in height, such colour zoning not only jazzes up an otherwise muted palette of white, grey and natural wood, but also ensures visual continuity since the height of the lower white sections is the same throughout the house. The colour scheme also conveys a sense of human scale even in the tallest spaces like the kitchen whose considerable ceiling height is counterbalanced not only by the wall’s colour segmentation but also by the L-shaped cupboard-cum-partition structure that matches the height of the walls’ lower white sections. Coupled with the elegant minimalism of the interior design, the house is a paradigm of making more with less.