In a quiet Queenstown neighbourhood, a family house by RT+Q Architects defies the disadvantages of its site and poses creative solutions to bring light and air into its interior spaces.

It is not an easy accomplishment to design a house that retains a façade of privacy on its public-facing exterior, yet feels bright, inviting and filled with natural light behind its public face. Yet, it is a spatial juxtaposition that appears as a natural solution within the aptly named House with an Atrium by RT+Q Architects, which has designed the residence to make the maximum use of its site and to respond to the owners’ programmatic requirements.

From the very beginning, the clients – a couple with three children – expressed their desire for a design that would allow plenty of daylight into the interiors of their house. A challenging task for a site situated on a North-South facing plot of land and sandwiched between two other residential properties. The configuration of the rectangular plot also hindered the design team at RT+Q from designing big openings at the East- and West-facing façades. As a solution, the team chose to design a house with a large, double-volume atrium that pierced the first and second levels of the residence, bringing in light and air without attracting too much heat from the afternoon sun.

“One feature of a lot of our buildings is that their front façades do not give too much away but, internally, the houses still feel very open,” says Rene Tan, Director of RT+Q Architects, highlighting the recurring theme within a lot of firm’s projects. Within the House with an Atrium, too, the titular central void is instrumental in creating a sense of openness and space from the inside.

With the courtyard and its two-storey high green wall, the configuration of the communal spaces around the inviting atrium became a logical choice. On the first floor, the design team positioned the gallery and the dining area directly across from each other, providing expansive, unobstructed views of activities taking place at the opposite, East and West ends of the house, while placing a spacious living room at the front of the house facing out to the vibrant green wall. On the second floor, the team designed a master suite overlooking the atrium’s courtyard and the spaces below, giving the clients a broad overview of the entire house from the comfort of their room. Other bedrooms were given more privacy by being set back from the atrium via elongated circulation spaces around the internal courtyard.

In a similar, strategic move, the RT+Q team incorporated open light courts and glass floors above selected areas of the basement to bring natural light below ground and make the lobby, tuition and entertainment areas, as well as various service spaces, a welcoming, well-lit continuation of the family spaces above. The choice of materials, like light grey concrete and marble throughout the basement and upper floors, further enabled the team to create a sense of space and openness within the 7,700 square foot home.

The team took special delight in designing the first-storey staircase, which was crafted in the same spirit of bringing lightness and various transparencies into the dwelling. “The owners were adventurous enough to go with a different kind of staircase,” says project lead Allan Tongol. “As a result, we went with perforated steel as a chosen material for the treads and the rises, making the whole structure, just like the house itself, look transparent and light.”

RT+Q has designed a total of 83 houses since its inception in 2003. “The office is set up in such a way that everyone eventually does one house,” says Rene Tan, the firm’s director. With the number of its residential projects approaching high double digits and each team member’s active involvement in the design process, every new residence the firm does is a unique collaboration between the design team and the client, allowing each house to be a distinctive reflection of its owner’s identity, while retaining the sophisticated aesthetic that is a constant across the firm’s many residential works.

It is in this spirit that the House with Pianos has been designed for a couple with three young kids, and the family’s four treasured pianos. Having reached out to RT+Q after seeing one of the firm’s previous jobs, the clients asked for a comfortable, safe and accommodating home for their growing family, where their children could play freely both indoors and out.

“The spaces in the house are generally kid-friendly,” says project lead Virly Martadinata. “On the first floor, big sliding glass doors open up to the pool deck that leads to the front garden, so the children are able to play both indoors and outdoors without going through the main entrance. On the second level, there is a double volume family area, where the parents can look over their kids from the walkway outside of their master bedroom, or check in on them through a one-way mirror in their walk-in wardrobe.”

The semi-detached House with Pianos and its unusually wide plot posed a couple of challenges to the design team, including the task of getting the natural light and ventilation into the internal areas along the party wall. To minimise the dark spaces, the team shifted the building form’s main volumes that were initially stacked one atop the other to allow for vertical and horizontal openings and penetrations within the volumes to bring in light and air.

“The overall form started with a simple box sitting on another slightly narrower box,” says Martadinata. “The top box has shifted and skewed away from the party wall to allow for natural light and also to create an overhang for the pool deck below.” This design move also allowed for an integration of multiple courtyards and outdoor decks on the upper floors of the house, facilitating ventilation and adding bit of greenery into the living spaces, with additional punctures in the slanted roof bringing washes of light into the rooms below.

With the client not wanting too much furniture to clutter the house, the rich materials and the double volume spaces have instead taken centre stage. The first storey floor plan became an open, expansive space, maximising the use of the wide site, with the living, dining and dry kitchen areas merging seamlessly into each other, both visually and through the use of fair faced concrete and homogenous tiles. On the second floor, the design team used fair faced brick cladding to emphasise the double height family room, immediately highlighting the glass bridge, glass lift shaft and walkways connecting the bedrooms above. Using warmer materials like brick cladding and timber for floor surfaces on the upper levels, while confining the hardier, cooler materials mostly to the first level, the design team created a subtle distinction between the public and private areas, while retaining the visual linkages across the floors and connecting the spaces and the family as one.