TUNING THE TONE

The design choices the team could make for a flat renovation are limited. However, there are more and more occasions for architects to design such projects. They thought about what they, as architects, could do on these occasions.

The team took inspiration from ‘Villa Rothmayer’ (1928), a little-known masterpiece standing in a pleasant neighbourhood in Prague. The architect who designed the house is Otto Rothmayer. He was the student of Jože Plečnik and the project architect for the renovation of the Castle. Rothmayer developed this house while he was working on the Castle.

“We are not advocating for ‘returning to the past’ with this flat and instead wanted to connect to the legacy of Villa Rothmayer-like architecture and find its value and potential for the present.”

- Sawaki Nakayama Architects

The plan is a simple composition, where two rooms sandwich a washroom or storage room, and a circular staircase is attached. There is no dynamic spatial composition like an atrium, and each of the rooms has a simple square shape; nevertheless, this house has a specific spatial quality. It is not easy to describe in words, but it is a particular tone you can find in the homes built in the early modern period. You will discover Adolf Loos’s ‘Villa Müller’ close to this house. Loos’s house is famous for its rich, heavy space achieved by its complex spatial composition and luxurious materials. Still, Rothmayer’s house possesses a similar richness even though it is far smaller and more straightforward. But how did they capture such a tone in a modern-day renovation project?

When you look at the space of Villa Rothmayer, you realise that its tone is set mainly through storage furniture and tables. The furniture’s size, material, and feeling are carefully thought and designed to place luxury in the rooms. This aims to achieve a luxury that enriches daily life, different from the gorgeous premodern luxury gained through the extravagant use of materials. Interestingly, Rothmayer emphasised storage furniture for his design. Like Japan, the large storage furniture armoire or kas is originally something the bride brought to her new home. Shifting from this custom, it became a status symbol or heirloom, transforming the chest into a piece of furniture with a special meaning, something more than merely an object. Many modern architects used this special meaning for their designs to bring luxury to their spaces. The Citrohan Haus in Weissenhof (1927) and the Cabanon (1952), both designed by Le Corbusier, have heavy storage furniture sitting in the centre of the rooms. In both house, this one piece of furniture plays a significant role in setting the tone of the architectural spaces.

For this project, the client required a large kitchen and dining space. The team compactly arranged the bedroom and bathroom linearly; the leftover space became the kitchen and dining room. To divide the spaces, they introduced a piece of storage furniture between them. Its length was considerably longer than a typical piece of furniture, but by limiting its height we arrived at a peculiar proportion and thus an ambiguous impression, between furniture, architecture and object. Subsequently, the kitchen and dining table were designed as one piece, aligned to the length of the storage furniture. The sizes of the two pieces, the storage furniture and kitchen/table, was crucial for this house’s impression. They acknowledged the tone of Villa Rothmayer to these two pieces.

In Row Flat, the team carefully chose the details and finishings to reproduce the tone of Villa Rothmayer and similar early modern houses. They are not advocating for ‘returning to the past’ with this flat and instead wanted to connect to the legacy of Villa Rothmayer-like architecture and find its value and potential for the present. Here, they see the value in architects undertaking such renovation/interior projects.