Summer House

A house acts as a sanctuary. It is meant to be quite blunt from the outside – solid, mysterious and almost uninviting. The solid layers of stone peel off, like a disintegrating ruin, slowly exposing its inner guts of the house to nature. It is lighter, more transparent, and more porous. It revolves around the garden. The landscape becomes an extension of the interior spaces. This summer house located on the outskirts of Cairo, Egypt, was commissioned as a holiday retreat away from the noise and pollution of the city.

 
 

The house forms a slender L-shaped volume that defines a garden. This configuration allows all rooms to have a view over the central pool deck positioned against a dense vegetation backdrop. The outer shell of the house is covered in locally quarried “hashmy” stone while the elevations facing the inner garden are clad in lighter materials such as glass and metal. Vertical louvers screen the internal facades from south western sunlight and provide additional privacy against lateral views from adjacent neighbors.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The linearity of the spatial configuration allows opportunities for cross ventilation. All rooms in the house get double exposure albeit more concentrated towards the garden. The layout stages moments of dialogue with the surrounding landscape, sometimes intimate and sometimes intended to provide a sense of openness and spaciousness increasing the perception of the scale of the garden.

Team: Daniel Furdik, Ahmad Othman, Malak Faradoun, Mohammed Tarifi, Hasheel Mohammed, Tarik Farrag, Wafa Sleiman

Client: Private

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