The pandemic and lockdown put cramped apartments in apartment blocks to a severe test. Many of us then dreamed of at least a small house under the forest, close to nature, where we could wait out this uncertain time in peace, and then, who knows, maybe even stay there permanently.
Kuba Szczęsny, founder of the SZCZ studio, cooperates with Simple House, a company that offers prefabricated, single-family frame houses using energy-efficient and passive technologies. When deciding on such a solution, clients choose the house module that suits their needs, the layout of the body and the finish of the facade. One of the houses based on the brand's offer is D58 - a house with a usable attic with a total usable area of about 90 m².
D58 house with a usable attic
Photo: Bartek Warzecha
Ola Kloc: You have already completed several projects for Simple House. What makes the D58 model stand out?
Kuba Szczęsny: This particular model best "pretends" to be a small house, at the same time surprising with the impression of spaciousness and sheer square footage inside. The name comes from the usable area of the first floor, by the way, as in almost all the typologies I came up with for Simple House, whereby with a 45-degree pitch roof we get two more bedrooms in the attic with a bathroom and a dressing room. The idea came from a scene in "Yellow Submarine," an animated film about the Beatles, where, probably in Liverpool, the characters enter a small shed that turns out to contain a gigantic interior.
D58 house designed by Kuba Szczęsny
Photo: Bartek Warzecha
Ola: What is the most important thing for you in designing model homes?
Kuba: Maybe it would be better to call them repetitive houses. There are several things that are important and interesting at the same time. First, that unlike most of my past and current work, they are indeed unavoidable objects, so you can think of them in terms of repeatable products. Individualized, but still produced repeatedly and in different variants.
Secondly, it is the level of the aforementioned individualization that differentiates us from most of the market that is important. Simply put, at an early stage of inventing the brand and its products, I proposed to the owners to take seriously the basic need of most Poles - the need for self-expression, both in terms of the exterior of the house and its interior. This involved a number of challenges in the form, in particular, of defining the tools, scope and limits of individualization, but thanks to this, a representative of the Polish middle class can, to a fairly large extent, customize the house to his or her imagination without destroying the overall aesthetic expression.
Third, we recognized from the outset that these can be neither forms that suck up to sentiment, nor overly "modern" or exuberant. These houses are supposed to give a soothing impression that one has already seen them somewhere, a bit like the characteristic catalog German houses we can find in Warmia, Mazury, Silesia and Pomerania. I had to be very "beaten on my paws" not to project my need for expression onto these objects.
Fourth, simplicity and small scale: these houses are supposed to easily grow into the landscape, and, properly planted with greenery, even disappear into it, unlike eccentric "modern" residences or pseudo-Palladian suburban palaces.
Simple House
Photo: Bartek Warzecha
Ola: The houses you design often have a small area, how do you solve the issue of the functionality of their interiors?
Kuba: For the most part, interiors are supposed to be close to square, they are supposed to be set up using standard products from IKEA, VOX, BRW, or Bo Concept, while minimizing space, so that the client doesn't pay for unnecessary meters by taking out more credit, and after all, most of us are embroiled in one or another long-term repayable bank products. On top of that, evolvability is important: excess space begins to "scare" when children fly out of the nest and it becomes clear that living in a multigenerational family is not attractive to them. On the other hand, we are often persuaded, especially by young couples, to leave untouched the attic, where activities, and therefore expenses, will only make sense when children arrive.
Ola: Are repetitive houses a new quality for catalog houses?
Kuba: Of course, although it's a slightly different market and different customers. At Simple House, it's all about care: the sales department, the in-house architect, external architects affiliated with Simple House, and sometimes myself, provide a form of substantive care, including advice on what model to choose, what changes make sense, how to fit it on the plot, and so on. This is not a ready-made project "from the store," which people then have to deal with on their own, looking for an architect, crew, etc. Of course, often clients come to Simple House already with an architect, often also brought by an architect, but that's another story. Often we advise, against the interest of maximizing sales, proposing smaller square meters than clients imagined at first. We urge them to look at houses as machines that must be consistently developed, from the choice of surface area, to the idea of heating and providing energy, or minimizing its consumption, to skillful shading and opening to the sun. That's why we often find from our conversations that it's better to buy a smaller house, but with a whole package of technologies that will make it a truly energy-efficient building, not just a house with energy-efficient walls....
The name D58 comes from the usable area of the first floor
Photo: Bartek Warzecha
Ola: What is the market demand for this type of solution?
Kuba: More and more, after all, it's an exponentially growing segment of the market, especially in the context of pandemic insulation, but also as a result of rising prices for everything from electricity and real estate to labor and building materials. Our biggest surprise is the increase in interest in micro-homes, a great hobby of mine, especially among the creative sector, managers and lawyers. Now, with the pandemic still going on, they are deciding to "dust off" forgotten "grandma's" recreational plots, erecting cottages that may be small in size, but offer basically all the functionality of much larger homes. It's a lot of fun to watch people driving cars more expensive than our SIMs buy cottages that are 30 sq. m. on the first floor (plus a mezzanine), and then hire fashionable interiors designers to make them into amazingly luxurious trombones!
