House N

The house is home to a couple and their dog. It is made of three shells of increasing size nested one inside another. The outermost covers the whole plot and creates a sheltered, semi-outdoor garden. The second encloses a smaller space within it, and the third a smaller interior still. Daily life unfolds within this gradation of domains.

The design team had long questioned the idea of a street and a house divided by a single wall. They wondered whether a graded range of spaces at different distances from the street could take its place: somewhere inside the house fairly close to the street, somewhere a little further off, and somewhere far away in secure privacy.

Life here resembles living among clouds. There is no sharp boundary anywhere, only a gradual change of domain. The ideal, as the team describes it, is an outdoor space that feels like an interior and an interior that feels like the outdoors. In a nested structure, the inside is always also an outside.

Three nested shells suggest endless nesting, since the world itself is made of layers within layers, and here only three are given a barely visible form. The house treats city and dwelling as two expressions of one continuum, the undulation of a primal space in which people live.