Jan Jakub Tesař of Prague-based Stempel & Tesar architekti, has completed a house in the city for his own family. The Minimal Maximum House is very much a crafted, self-directed project for Tesař, who joined the practice with his former teacher Ján Stempel in 2008.
Describing the house as ‘a personal manifesto in which more than two decades of designing residential architecture for others is condensed into a single, highly concentrated response,’ the new house sits on a tightly constrained and challenging spot in the city.
‘Every centimetre became a deliberate decision, resulting in a ‘minimal maximum’ – a house without corridors,’ says Tesař. The key feature is the three-storey central dining space that forms the core of the house. Over four metres tall, it connects to the various levels via a winding steel staircase and a series of half landings.
The site itself had been vacant for many years, located on a slope between two apartment buildings and villas, home to some ancient garages. Measuring 240 sq m, it also sits close to a railway track and contains a protected mature cherry tree, all factors that have dissuaded commercial developers from having a go.
For an architect, looking for a site for his own family, it presented an opportunity. ‘The plot shaped it, ambition motivated it, and responsibility refined it,’ Tesař says, ‘I built the house for us, for the whole family, but it reflects my ego. An ego shaped by twenty-five years of learning from the experienced and by building homes for others.’
By building high on a tight 70 sq m floor plan, Tesař and his team have created a three-bedroom house with a distinct vertical character that has around 100 sq m of accommodation. Light rights for neighbouring properties guided the shape and setback of the new house, with a frontage along the existing street line and its own garden to the rear.
The use of offset floor levels makes the most of the available space, with a sunken living area set into the hillside on the lower ground floor, stepping down from the entrance level. As one progresses up the house, this arrangement replaces a conventional hallway and corridors, with the staircase serving as the circulation and the 4.2m high dining room serving as lightwell and focal point.
The concrete structure required for the partially subterranean levels are left exposed and built-in furniture is used extensively to maximise the sense of space and the purity of the wall planes. Detail is everything. A single walnut tree provided the richly grained wood found throughout the kitchen, living room and doors, while in bedrooms have a more pared back, neutral finish.
This simplicity and minimalism is also carried through to the façade, which is clad throughout with vertically ribbed white profiled aluminium sheeting. In the dining room, a large sliding glass window opens up the space to the garden in the warm summer months.
Environmental performance has been carefully considered, with triple-glazed windows, high levels of insulation and underfloor heating powered by an air-to-water heat pump. The garden is irrigated by collected rainwater and a modest photovoltaic array on the roof deals with day-to-day energy needs.
As Tesar notes, the house is a unique creation, shaped by necessity and the demands of the site, but also highly crafted and individual in its detailing, right down to the custom front door handle, with ‘precise and functional geometry [that] also serves as an artistic statement.’