Arets-Sijstermans House + Studio

An interpretation of the specific restrictions on the site imposed by various building regulations dictated a maximum volumetric envelope. It is into this simple volume that the complex and diverse home and office programme was installed. The confrontation between the restrictions of the site and the complexity of the brief framed the subsequent architectural manipulations. Set on a sloping corner allotment in a suburban housing and villa area on the edge of the historic centre of Maastricht, this disjunction between the simplicity of its appeareance and the complex spatial arrangement of the interior accentuates the perverse qualities of suburban life explored by David Lynch's 'Blue Velvet'. The building uses the natural slope of the site to articulate a section that allows one to enter the house from street level to a interior mezzanine before descending to the gardenlevel or rising to the third level. The building is divided vertically by a technical space, cocooned in turn by a diaphragm party wall into the two programmatically different areas of the office and the home. The sectional deviation allows the building to maximise its prescribed envelope of 1.5 stories above and stories below street level and to increase inter-floor communication.
A concrete box is embedded into the site with primary views through large openings to the garden and court; the second more private wooden box is set on top, fronting onto the street and the garden behind. The top level within the wooden box contains the sleeping rooms of the house and the meeting room, administration and directors office. One descends to the 'ground floor' which contains the living areas and the kitchen and opens onto the expansive garden, swimming pool and terrace. The 'ground floor' office space and project room opens to the side facing away from the private garden to a walled court with glassbrick floor. The lower level is for the office. It extends under the house and contains the drawing room, archive, workshop and preparation areas. Light enters through the glass bricks of the walled courtyard and through windows that open onto areas of the garden that are scolloped out and shielded from the inhabitants of the house section.