Seoul studio OBBA has finished a house for a pair of newlyweds, featuring a floor that doubles as a bench, a retractable staircase and a devoted loft for a pet cat .
The residence was conceived as an alternative to the apartment blocks and multi-tenant buildings that frequently become the very first homes of younger married couples in the South Korean capital.
“The standardised typology and in excess of-inflated housing price restrict the parameters of selection in selecting a house for a younger couple,” explained architect Sojung Lee, one particular of the two founders of OBBA.
“The customers asked us to create a home primarily based upon their fundamental queries about how to commence a life with each other, satisfying the simple essentials,” he continued. “They needed a modest but plentiful life.”
Named 50m2 residence, the compact house is far more than 20 square metres smaller sized than the common newlyweds’ property. It is organised over three main storeys, but there are intermediate levels between floors.
There are also several unconventional details that would have been tough to install in a typical apartment unit – the most noticeable being a committed staircase and loft for the clients’ pet cat.
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Appearing at first glance to be a extended and elaborate shelf, the feline-width staircase winds up close to the redundant room above the main entrance and stairs. At the end, a generous ledge allows the cat to survey the comings and goings of its owners.
“The cat loves the room a great deal and uses the staircase and plays there a great deal,” Lee advised Dezeen. “The cat is employed to sitting and hunting outdoors waiting for the clients right up until they come back from the perform, and welcome visitors from the staircase when they comes in.”
The kitchen and living space occupy the middle floor, to make sure they both get a lot of organic light.
Rather than separating the rooms by walls, OBBA chose to set the residing area 3 actions greater. This arrangement enables the kitchen counter to also be utilized as a desk or dining table, if residents sit down on the edge of the residing space floor.
Above the kitchen is a loft used by the clientele for learning or watching movies, which can be accessed using a wooden staircase that extends out from a wall beside the kitchen. When closed, it gets element of a bookcase slotted behind.
A pair of bedrooms and a bathroom are located on the ground floor. There are also balconies and terraces on all three amounts.
“The issue was to conjure up a tiny but plentiful spatiality inside the modest amount of construction spending budget,” stated Lee. “The house is modest but each and every nook and corner of the area is effectively utilised.”
The home is situated in Gaemimaeul – which translates as “ant village” and features a mix building varieties organized across steep slopes.
“The walls of this outdated shanty town are decorated with paintings in attempt to embellish the location, and this exudes a mysterious ambiance,” mentioned Lee.
In trying to keep with this hodgepodge of structures, the house’s exterior resembles two buildings fused with each other. The first is a low-rise rectilinear block with white walls, and the 2nd is a small black house with a gabled roof.
There is a four-metre change in level across the website, and the house sits halfway amongst. For this reason, the main entrance is positioned between the lower and middle floors.
A retaining wall of grey blocks wraps close to the internet site perimeter, presenting a blank canvas that could someday be painted to match its neighbours.
Sojung Lee and architect companion Sangjoon Kwak founded OBBA, or Office for Past Boundaries Architecture, in 2012. Other tasks by the studio incorporate an apartment building featuring a semi-outside stairwell screened behind a area of open brickwork.
Photography is by Kyungsub Shin.
In accordance to the Seoul Institute’s 2015 census information, the common floor spot of a newlywed’s house is 72.7m2, and among them, 44.6% lives in an apartment building and/or multipurpose business/residential developing typology. Two third of newly-wed couples lease on deposit basis, and 49.3% of people couples spend 100,000,000 to 200,000,000 KRW. The standardized typology and in excess of-inflated housing price tag limit the parameter of choice in picking a residence for a young couple.
The clientele were soon to be married. They asked us to build a property based on their fundamental questions about how to start a life with each other, satisfying the simple essentials. They desired a modest but plentiful existence in it. The project emerged from obtaining a realistic solution for the newlyweds to move into an different abode, other than an apartment constructing or a multi-unit housing.
The site is sitting in an entrance area of the Gaemimaeul, one particular of the handful of remaining colonies of rag pickers in Seoul, Seodaemoon-ku, Hongjaedong. The walls of this previous shanty town are decorated with paintings in try to embellish the area, and this exudes a mysterious ambiance. Two adjacent roads–8m wide on the north-east side and 3 m broad on the north-west–meet in an angle, and the site’s south-west and south-east sides are narrow alleyways only for the pedestrians. The web site is steeply sloped, whose degree variation is 4m.
We concentrated on 3 major concerns. A single was to discover ways to read through and approach the bad situation of the client’s purchasable land inside of the constrained spending budget. The other was to integrate the residence into the landscape of colorful wall paintings that are contrasted with the present monotonous shanty town. Lastly, the situation was to conjure up a tiny but plentiful spatiality inside of the modest sum of construction spending budget.
It was critical to protect and utilise the web site problem as significantly as we could, in purchase for the most successful building approach. The property is two-story building that contains minimal plans requested from the client. The floor spot is much less than 50m2, the highest spot that doesn’t legally call for a parking whole lot.
As the web site is surrounded by the roads sloping up in the direction of north, we designed the entrance of the developing in in between the first and second floors. For the efficient motion and program arrangement of the property, we positioned the residing area and the kitchen on the second floor, in purchase for a adequate all-natural light and a fantastic see, as the couple spends most of their time in these spaces. Some personal rooms and bathroom are on the ground floor. The house is little but each and every nook and corner of the space is efficiently utilized. At the attic of the residence is a review or a movie screening room, and the stairs that lead to the attic functions as bookshelves. There is a degree variation between the living area and the kitchen so that the cooking table is extended to a seated dining table in the residing room.
Our dwelling culture has been occupied by the big scale improvement along the capitalist logic, which resulted in erasing numerous of the city’s own qualities. If we seem for answers to the remaining bad-conditioned modest lands in the city, one could anticipate that our dwelling typology be abound once again, whilst reserving the traces of the regional qualities.
Venture credits:
Architects: OBBA – Sojung Lee, Sangjoon Kwak
Design crew: Jaeho Kim, Daae Kim, Hojae Lee, Sojae Ahn
Construction: TCM Global
Ground floor prepare 
2nd floor program 
Loft prepare 
Segment a single 
Section two
