Horizontal Home

My first attempt at housing design was not one of ease. With the parameter of 1,200 square feet, I designed a residential home for a family of 5. From the first plan I sketched, I rejected the standard boxy typology of the modern home. I wanted to design a home that encouraged circulation and had inherent complexity. I found this guarantee in the octagon.

Organized into three wings, the octagon house has a clear division of private and public services. Parents and kids occupy the right and left sides of the house, whereas the front of the house is dedicated to entertaining and communal gathering. Furthering this theme of intimacy vs. community, I use partition walls in the children’s room, and at the opening of the pool. This allows for the users to maximize space while still enabling private spaces.

Circulation throughout the home is made effortless as the utilities of the home are all organized along the walls. Clearly visible in the plan, each exterior wall has either a two or three foot “thickening”. This thickening is made up of kitchen services, closets, beds, desks and more. This module continues into the parents and children’s room. The children’s room was designed as one large room for all three of them, but each child has their own sector with a desk, closet and a bed. The use of Murphy beds in a room with such an irregular shape freed up much needed circulation space. I continued to employ moves like this throughout the design process.

While working with such unconventional angles, I ran into issues with wall placement. There are three instances in the home where I made incisions into the vertices intrinsic to the octagonal nature of the house. These incisions now act as additional courtyards, which would otherwise create unwanted acute angles within the home. This module also ended up accentuating the existing courtyards. The house has 3 courtyards; Two designated entries and a swimming pool. The entries are diagonal from each other, the first also functions as a dining space, the second doubles as an in-home office. The pool, located in the center of the home, connects to the two showers of the house which both open to private bathrooms. I did this in effort to centralize the wet services and avoid users dragging water throughout the house.