Jisan Stone House / PLAN Architects office
Text description provided by the architects. The site is located on the boundary of Mudeungsan National Park and Gwangju downtown. You can approach the site via a two-lane road that connects nature and the city together and its streetscape is a mixture of tall ginkgo trees, old houses, and commercial buildings. Since some portion of the land has been incorporated into the road during road maintenance long ago, the site has a triangular shape. In addition, the usable area has been largely reduced to 62.73m2 due to the exception of land area in accordance with widening standards for the backside road and retreat of the frontal road by two meters according to the landscape districts. Two sides of the triangular site face the road, while the third face in the south and are covered by a neighboring building.
The couple runs a restaurant business, and they requested some additional features for sharing their daily life while working and enjoying their own hobbies at home at the same time. Since the house is located too close to the surroundings without any buffer area, the couple also wanted to make a clear distinction between their house and external places.
So, the house is largely divided into three functional levels. The first floor is a dining and kitchen space for spending time with friends and food. The second to fourth floors are designed for complete residence functions. Lastly, the rooftop space is designed to be a place for actively interacting with the surrounding natural environment.
The exterior wall is seen as the first boundary between inside and outside, and it is designed by piling up solid natural stones (coursed masonry) to bring mental stability to the residents and to symbolize an introduction to nature as a part of the streetscape.
The inner space has an exposed concrete finish and built-in furniture made of natural wooden materials in order to maintain a consistent tone from natural exterior beauty to the interior.
Loose Boundary – The interior space uses skip floors to add height variation, secure a sense of openness in the living room space, and reduce the burden of moving between floors. The stairs are not divided into separate places, and they do not conflict with the functional spaces of each floor to boost space utilization and movement efficiency.
In this house, the spaces are designed to be as loose as possible, except for the bedroom and bathroom. For the boundaries between the children’s room and stairs, hallway and washing and laundry space, hobby room and stairs, and living room and garden, they either have transparent glass openings or don’t have any boundaries at all. This is to seek a loose boundary and utilize the narrow space efficiently so that the space can be either divided or not depending on the purpose and form of use. The furniture in each room has been designed in the first place to create a sense of spatial unity.
Flexible Intervention – As the space was limited, dividing, and merging the spaces centered on the stairs was a significant precondition in the design planning. To divide and merge the spaces, the house was divided into the first floor and second floor, second floor and third floor, and third floor and above, the stairs changed their function, shape, and direction for each space. The first floor has a transparent glass railing to focus on the interior materials. The second floor and third floor have framed structure that also functions as boundary walls of the bathroom, custom-made sofas, and bottom storage spaces. The third floor and above have a rhythmic string design in order to express open walls in a new way. These designs show how the stairs were designed differently based on the characteristics of each space.
House as A Part of Scenery – The exterior wall determines the first impression of the house. It is designed by carefully piling up irregularly-shaped coursed masonry made by processing raw materials as least as possible. The two-meter pedestrian space is an open area that touches the stone wall, and it has a concrete polishing finish to make the pedestrians recognize the boundary between the road and the house even without the wall and make the drivers recognize the house as the sign placed between the boundary of the city and nature. The exterior wall openings have different sizes and locations, and they are intentionally designed disorderly in order to offset the sense of weight from hard and coarse stone walls. The rooftop canopy structure and windows get wider towards the top in order to reflect the visual relationship with the Mudeungsan Mountain in distance.
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