Status: Construction Drawings
Area: 332㎡
Vancouver, BC, Canada, 2017
Villa No. 3 is at 598 Craigmohr drive, West Vancouver, B.C. Canada. This location has a fantastic view of the whole of Vancouver underneath itself. Our design emphasizes this fantastic view by moving more private parts of the house to the 2nd floor to levitate above the rest and give the city's best view from each room.
In a sculptural sense, the ground floor is the base of the upper house. It's like a bold rock penetrating the ground and defying the large slope. The lower box establishes Nature&Built balance and becomes a buffer between the hill and the upper levitating house. Simultaneously, the lower compartment unifies different spaces and materials with a grid that determines all the partitions through micro courtyards and defines a form of the villa's ground floor. The upper house is a light frameless glass box enriched with light wooden louvers that give the facade a bit of texture and a warmer feeling.
Our main challenge was to play with this house's duality and achieve an exciting counterpoint with privacy and openness. We made the private part of the house completely open and light and the public massive and opaque while still assuring complete privacy for the upper house and immediacy for the lower house. The first floor is an open space in between, and it becomes a spacious "backyard" of the home that allows more privacy than the front yard, and again, a great view of Vancouver panorama.
