Designed by none less than Kengo Kuma’s protégé, Hiroshi Nakamura and his team at NAP, this Hiroshima house is pure and gentle ingenuity. For starters, the garden is placed pretty conventionally at the house front yet cannot be seen there; and secondly, the garden is raised and occupies an upper floor!

Nudged by the homeowners to find a solution to the problem of noise from the busy city street full of cars, buses and trams that the house is located on, Nakamura and team turned to glass bricks for insulation. A wall of 8.6 m x 8.6 m glass bricks, made from optically transparent Borosilicate, forms the home’s façade from the first floor upwards, above the semi-basement which accommodates a garage and a glazed entrance foyer to the stairs leading to the rest of the house. This wall has been specially engineered by ‘stringing’ 6000 glass bricks in columns through steel bars suspended from a beam, which was in turn strengthened by pre-tensioned steel bars, with flat steel plates strung at intervals along with the glass bricks to handle lateral stresses. This resultant marvelous glass façade numbs out the external noises to create an oasis of serenity inside despite maintaining a visual connection with the action of the street outside.

Most remarkably, this glass wall has a pretty garden immediately behind it that flows seamlessly into the living room that follows and, from there, to the rest of the house. The flimsy metal net curtain that partitions garden and living room is easily retracted to reveal another glass brick wall backing the living room to screen it from the stairs behind it. A pool in the garden actually tops the entrance foyer below to create welcoming patterns of light filtering through the water. The dining and kitchen area that continues from the living room reveals another (rear) garden at the end of it, all of this lending the house a porous transparency with rich green visuals despite the sound insulation provided by the glass brick front wall.

Another garden shows up at the rear side, set back from the lower garden on the upper level, making its greens peep into the children’s room and an exotic bathroom there. Bedrooms and other rooms are spread out through all levels in the house from semi-basement to upper floors, accessed by a central elevator and the stairs. Observed from afar, the little house looks submerged among the tall buildings and congested traffic surrounding it. But, inside the ‘Optical Glass House’ as it has come to be named, one can experience an ethereal serenity under verdant trees by a poolside as one observes the light filtering in through the waterfall-like sheet of glass bricks cast playful patterns on the garden walls and floor!

The team at HYLA seem to have unstintingly committed themselves to merging green and built areas inseparably in the design of this Singapore residence. Again, it is very difficult to say exactly where the garden lies vis-à-vis the house here which, under a single massive pitched roof envelopes built quarters and landscape into a homogenous living experience.

 A mighty grey brick façade reveals a modest entrance door to the interiors while another enormous opening lets the exterior elements of a large pool and garden peep and pass through from out to in. And, once inside this poolside under the high roof, one is treated to the sunlight pouring in through the enormous, full-length opening in it, the pool, the garden and the feast of textures and patterns around, leading the house to be named ‘The Room without a Roof’!

The home, basically, has a large pool running along the entire length of its building and a little beyond, and the green running alongside it goes around the house and even inside, making appearances in patches along the stairwell wall or in passages, rooms and other areas. The grey brick wall that is essentially the external wall seems suspended from a beam three storeys above as it stops half-way down the lowest level to let the garden slide in from below itself. The porosity resulting from these arrangements not only incorporates a green view but also plenty of daylight and fresh breeze in every part of the house.

The wall is beautifully textured by a simple intermittent omission and protrusion of single bricks, and competed by the pattern of the enormous perforated pre-cast concrete panel that screens the entire length of the upper floor of the residence, again stopping way short of meeting the ceiling to retain the sense of uninterrupted continuity between outdoors and indoors. 

So many different ways and means have been explored to weave outdoors and indoors into a composite whole, framed in the beauty of exquisite textures which include the warmth of large wooden windows among the cold grey of brick and concrete, which make this Singapore home an experiential delight!

These two residence design again highlight the fact that no situation can suffice as an excuse to do away with greens in a home, some little bit of will can show the way to get them right in!!