It's an ordinary single-family house, although it looks like a factory hall or industrial warehouse. The net house, designed by Mikolaj Machulik of the Department of Architecture, combines industrial aesthetics with forms typical of single-family housing. How does such a mixture look?
Thenet house, which was built in Wyry, a sizable village near Mikolow, fits into its surroundings in a rather unusual way.Unlike the standard approach to this problem, in which the landscape and urban context is taken into account, the building's chief designer, Mikolaj Machulik, also decided to try to fit the House on the Net more deeply into the architectural and industrial identity of Silesia. How did they manage to do this?
House on the Web
Photo: Tomasz Zakrzewski © Zakład Architektury / Mikołaj Machulik
a note of individualism
Attempting a cursory description of the House in the Net, one gets the impression that it is a typical single-family building of the kind we can meet millions of in Polish villages and towns. The net house stood on a small plot of land covered by the Local Development Plan. This required the designers to adapt the body of the building to the surrounding buildings - first of all, to crown it with a symmetrical, gabled roof. The preparation (although only seemingly!) of a non-standard project was also not conducive to the shape of an out-of-shape, five-sided plot, which is located at the intersection of two streets and the characteristics of the soil on it.
House on the Web
Photo: Tomasz Zakrzewski © Zakład Architektury / Mikołaj Machulik
house - residential factory
Despite the fact that the Local Development Plan required the erection of a classic block with a gabled roof, the House in the Net stands out against the architectural landscape of the village, reflecting the economic character of the region. This was achieved, among other things, through a conscious choice of materials used to finish the house. The roof and parts of the facade were covered with corrugated fiber cement panels. The building's gable walls, in turn, featured aluminum expanded metal, adding an industrial feel to the silvery exterior. Together with the slight angle of the roof slope, the horizontal skylight at the top of the roof and the asymmetrical outline of the facade, this gives the building a resemblance to industrial buildings, characteristic of the industrial landscape of Silesia.
House on the Web
Photo: Tomasz Zakrzewski © Zakład Architektury / Mikołaj Machulik
The body of the building here is a play on the archetype of the Polish single-family house, with a gabled roof and, what follows, a triangular gable wall. The proportions are out of the ordinary - the house is a one-story structure with an area of more than 230 square meters. The requirement for a gabled roof was used here as a creative impulse - at the side elevations, its eaves protrude significantly above the outline of the foundations, covering the building like a tent or a voluminous mantle. Its halves create spacious arcades housing a carport and a hidden terrace at the back of the house. The expansive roof slopes are supported by two screen walls, one each at the front and rear of the building. On the southwest elevation, at the rear of the lot, a small field covered with white plaster, resembling a cross-section of the house, is inscribed into the elevation. This is a "children's house," whose external form signals the function performed by this part of the building: for behind the wall is a children's room.
Home on the Web
Photo: Tomasz Zakrzewski © Zakład Architektury / Mikołaj Machulik
Functionally, the House in the Net has been divided into two main parts - the front one, which houses a spacious living room with a kitchen, bathrooms and other utility rooms, and the private one, which includes a bedroom and a children's room, both open to a terrace lined with black wood. The interiors here are high, and the various angles of the ceilings here are determined by the slope of the asymmetrical roof slopes. Light enters the central space - the living room with the kitchen - not only through the extensive glazing of the facade, but also through a skylight squeezed into the roof's fold.
House on the Web
Photo: Tomasz Zakrzewski © Zakład Architektury / Mikołaj Machulik
black and white classics
Minimalism prevails in the interiors. Similarly, as in the case of parts of the facade, some of the interior walls were lined with black tan wood. The noble material contrasts with the snow-white plaster on the walls, with silvery and gray details in between on the valor scale. Interior furnishings were also selected under the dictates of black, white and gray, although with a small deviation. The achromatic palette is broken by soft color accents in the children's room, which appears to be the coziest place in the entire house. It has been effectively planned in terms of space utilization, as the architects took care to separate the sleeping area by overhanging the mezzanine under the sloping roof.
House on the Web
Photo: Tomasz Zakrzewski © Zakład Architektury / Mikołaj Machulik
home made to measure
The raw aesthetics of the interiors and the way the rooms were laid out were influenced by the person of the client. As the architects explain:
The center of the house is not a fireplace, but an aquarium protected from excessive lighting. The client is a lover of aquarium fish and natural greenery, but also raw, dark metal music and sci-fi. He does some of the work remotely from home, with international evaluation of specialized, scientific photos via the Internet, for which he needs a small but dark place. All this had to find its expression in the architecture.