Sustainable Asian House. Paul McGillick
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The house aims to engage with the street life of the neighbourhood.
The shutters, made from a mix of recycled timbers, can be closed for privacy but also opened to engage with the street.
The internal courtyard looks towards his son’s playroom.
‘I didn’t want a big house and I didn’t have a big budget. But when I was living in Thailand as a kid I loved the street culture. You had ice cream carts, junk men, dogs in the street, buffaloes. It’s a sad scene now because there’s no street culture any more.’—Chatpong Chuenrudeemol
Designing their own homes gives architects the opportunity to play with ideas and explore their own preoccupations. These days, clients typically want a house which turns its back on the street because security has become such a big issue. Architect Chatpong Chuenrudeemol understands this ‘defensive mindedness’, but he loves street life. When it came to designing his own home in the Ekamai district of Bangkok, he wanted to be able to balance his privacy and the need for security with engaging with the neighbourhood.
This interest in engagement is not just a sentimental idea. It is a recognition that social and cultural sustainability is as important as environmental sustainability. A large part of who we are is bound up with our cultural inheritance. Allowing a culture to die or cutting people off from a living tradition can lead to alienation, which is destructive at both the personal and social levels.
‘For us’, says Chatpong, ‘it is important to find our own language that’s rooted in culture, in the climate and in a lot of intangibles. And what I also think is important is the playfulness of Thai culture.’
Chatpong chose his site carefully. It is a corner block on a no-through road. There is, he says, a patchwork or quiltwork character to Bangkok’s streets which he thinks this street typifies. The scale of the houses and the way they relate to the street and to each other makes for what he calls a ‘street room’. For this reason, he wanted to keep his house to the scale of its neighbours. Rather than have high ceilings on the ground level, he chose relatively low ceilings—’because I have a child and I wanted the ceilings at the scale of a child’—which gave him the flexibility to go higher on the upper level and maximize the use of natural light.
The plot is rectangular but the house is L-shaped, with the entry and garage at the foot of the long leg. Arrival is through the internal courtyard, which is formed by the L shape of the house and the long street elevation. The outer ‘wall’ of the house comprises a row of vertical timber shutters. As Chatpong explains, the wall ‘redefines the perimeter wall urban house in Bangkok’, which typically has a wall and the house set back from the wall, creating an unusable ‘no-man’s land’ in between. During the day, the shutters open the courtyard to the street and draw air in to ventilate both the courtyard and the house. At night, or when the occupants are elsewhere, the house is secured by closing the shutters.
Just as the courtyard opens to the street, so the house also opens on to the courtyard. The north-facing aspect, along with a mature tree that serves as their ‘canopy’, ensures that the house is never subject to direct sunlight. In fact, the room most exposed is the upstairs western-facing bedroom of Chat’s son. But this borrows the lush garden of the next door neighbour to make it the coolest room in the house.
The timber shutters at street level are referenced on the upper level by the enfilade of timber-framed windows.
Ground floor plan.
Looking from the son’s playroom, the setback of the verandah and the tree ensure ample shading.
The courtyard and many features inside the house, such as the vertical casement windows upstairs and the narrow, vertical double doors downstairs, hint at traditional Thai houses with their typical use of timber, shutters and elongated proportions.
All of the timber used in the house is recycled from old Thai timber stilt houses. As Chat points out, using old timber is not only sustainable but also highly functional because it has been thoroughly cured and, therefore, is not susceptible to shrinkage. Door and window frames are all made from a local redwood hardwood. The louvres on the street wall are a mixed of recycled timbers, which give the shutters tonal variety. The floors and ceilings are made from tabaag, ‘the poor man’s teakwood’, a wood that is commonly shunned. But it is a highly sustainable timber because it is fast growing and not endangered. It is also inexpensive and completely termite-resistant. It also provided Chat with a light-coloured local hardwood which is hard to source locally.
Otherwise, the house is made from plaster and concrete with great attention paid to fine detailing, for example, with the door and window frames and with the ledges and overhangs which protect the house from run-off staining.
The house is open plan with all spaces visually connected to one another. The downstairs is kitchen, dining and living, with a bathroom and Chat’s son’s ‘everything room’ on the short leg of the L, which also opens directly on to the courtyard. This room, which is self-contained and semi-independent of the rest of the house, is significant because it signals a very specific understanding of the role of the child and his personal needs in the household. It is a recognition that the child is autonomous and not simply an extension of the parents. Hence, the child is given his own private space with its own entry.
When the shutters are open, the porosity of the house to the street is clear.
The son’s playroom, located on the short end of the L-shaped house, overlooks the courtyard.
Blackboard-style sliding doors in the playroom hide books and toys and can also be drawn on.
With the aim of optimizing space, the stairway to the upper level uses the depth of the wall to form a bookcase. The upstairs of the house is also very open, with a corridor spine overlooking the courtyard and incorporating a storage banquette linking the two bedrooms with a sitting room and a bathroom in the middle.
True to the sustainable agenda of the house, Chat has preferred to use recycled furniture. Some of this is classic Scandinavian, but other pieces are inherited, including his grandmother’s sofa and his own childhood bed, now used by his son.
Affordable and sustainable in so many ways, the Ekamai House also exhibits a high level of contemporary refinement. At the same time, its contemporary character does not prevent it from being a ‘good neighbour’ and helping to sustain a sense of community.
The double-glass doors hint at traditional Thai houses.
The furnishings and the vertical casement windows in the living room contribute to a sense of cultural continuity.
The inset bookcase on the stairway maximizes available space.
Scott