Villa CG Netherlands, New Enschede Home by Powerhouse Company, Dutch Residential Building Photos
Villa CG, New Enschede House
Contemporary Luxury Residence in Enschede, Netherlands property design by Powerhouse Company, Holland
Updated 11 Mar 2021 + 13 Sep 2016
Villa CG in Enschede
Design: Powerhouse Company, architects
Location: Enschede, The Netherlands
‘Design the most beautiful house on the street’, said our clients for Villa CG. A tall order, perhaps, as the neighbors are all one-off villas created for private clients by prominent architectural offices like SeARCH, Bolles + Wilson and Erick van Egeraat, but at Powerhouse Company we can never resist a challenge.
The design lives up to its owners’ ambitions by relying on perfect symmetry and a delicate balance between closed and open volumes. By framing a solid brick cube between two diaphanous glass wings, and sheltering all three volumes beneath a white canopy, we create an unexpectedly high-contrast, yet harmonious, visual experience.
Brick by Brick
We realized our villa’s closed front façade in beautiful long and narrow Wasserstrich bricks, their color carefully chosen to harmonize with the walnut wood of the interior. This brick cube shields the inhabitants from the street and is flanked by transparent and frameless glass bays, anticipating the openness of the rear garden side of the house.
A white stucco canopy, supported by slender columns, unifies the design, adds to the horizontal dynamic and creates an intermediate zone that blurs indoors and outdoors. From the street, attention focuses on the customized front door, with its strong geometric design in tombac.
Tombac is not much used in architecture – and we’re on something of a mission to change that. After all, this brass alloy with its high copper content is affordable and decorative – and good at withstanding corrosion, especially when coated. We love its warm golden hue and the fact that it’s easy to work with, making it perfect for expressive detailing such as the front door of Villa CG.
‘We achieved a richness in spatial experiences within the simplicity of the shapes and materials.’
– Stijn Kemper Partner Powerhouse Company
The ground floor, showing the closed front facade and open rear facade. The living room occupies the rear of the floor, with the kitchen in the glass wing on the right and the guestroom and study to the left. The brick facade conceals the bathroom, staircase and hall from view. Walnut wood elements – our fixed furniture – further screen the living room from the glass wings. The footprint of the design conforms to the strict site requirements of the masterplan for the area by Architecten Cie.
In the Zone
The white canopy extends out further at the rear of the villa, matching the footprint of the surrounding terrace and, together with the structural glass facade, creating an intermediate zone that enables the living room, terrace and garden to spatially flow into each other. The effect is heightened by the garden encroaching on the terrace beneath the overhang, softening the edges that define them.
‘The materialization reinforces the play with sight lines, openness and seclusion.’
– Stijn Kemper Partner Powerhouse Company
Villa CG is a family home in the eastern Dutch city of Enschede, close to the German border. The villa is located at the Museumlaan: a new, particularly special avenue reserved for designs by architects of national and international standing including SeARCH, Erick van Egeraat and Bolles+Wilson. The client, a couple with two children, commissioned Powerhouse Company in 2013 to design ‘the most beautiful house in the street’.
Villa CG is a two-storey home characterised by its horizontality. The design takes its cues from the surrounding low hedge to create a house that is about balance, symmetry and grace.
From the street, the house presents itself as a simple cube, clad in an unusually long, thin brick and divided vertically by a wide cantilevered floor slab. The front elevation is designed to be private and closed, with only the entrance door as a single opening.
At ground level at either end of the core, two full glass window bays contain the kitchen/dining room and a study/guest room. The glass facade wraps around the back to give the very private living room views over every aspect of the garden. On the ground floor, the exterior darkness of the bricks combines beautifully with American walnut veneer fittings.
The cube continues in the interior, shaped as furniture objects that define the living room and connect precisely with the brick exterior walls. The feeling of mass can further be found in the details of the house: the wood veneer is set around the corners of the kitchen and study room, to give the cube its thickness. Three walls of the living room are cladded with Earthcote, a claylike stucco. By combining the materials in such way, the cube’s interior and exterior can be read in a subtle way.
With two fully hidden sliding doors, the study and guest room can be closed off from the living room. The kitchen and living room are connected by a see-through fire place in one of the furniture elements.
An oak wood staircase winds up to the first floor underneath a large circular skylight. This floor is a cube in its most pure appearance: closed on three sides, while the three bedrooms have garden views through glass sliding doors that cover the full width of the rooms. The other spaces, like the bathroom and laundry room, receive daylight through large skylights.
The materials used in Villa CG are timeless and of a very high quality. The long, slim bricks give the cube a delicate and elegant level of detail. The color of the brick was selected very carefully in combination with the wood veneer of the interior. This, in combination with the translucent door that separates the entrance hall from the living room, the sand colored Earthcote wall cladding, light grey polyurethane floor and a variety of woods make the house appear dynamic yet harmonious.
New Villa in Enschede – Building Information
Location: Enschede, the Netherlands
Size: 240 m2
Architect: Powerhouse Company
Team: Nanne de Ru, Stijn Kemper, Ryanne Janssen, Stefan de Meijer, Donna van Milligen Bielke
Local architect: Van der Jeugd architecten
Masterplan: ArchitektenCie
Structural Engineer: Breed Integrated Design
MEP advisor: Adviesbureau Dijkoraad-Wiecherink
MEP contractor: Mulder-Lammertink installatie
Interior: de stijl interieur & design
Images by Ossip van Duivenbode
Villa CG, New Enschede House images / information from Powerhouse Company Architects, NL
Location: Enschede, Netherlands
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