Private house interior and garden renovation | The Hague, Netherlands | 2010-2011
Home-office
Designed by Auzie Triratnamurti
The house is a 19th century ground floor townhouse with a backyard. An extension part at the back of the house consists of two storeys, serves as the space for two bedrooms. Like most of any other old Dutch townhouses, this house has a narrow floor layout. It has a long open main hall consisted of living, dining and kitchen space that stands next to each other on the long floor plan. A lot of change was done in the renovation of this house. One of them was the breaking off the two layers of additional lowered ceiling in the living room and preservation of the 1890’s decorative ceiling. The old spiral staircase that connects together the bedroom on the ground floor and the one on the first floor was also replaced by an L-form staircase and addition of a wall that closes off the first bedroom to the second one.
Old and Modern
The old existing interior is combined with modern style by using recycled old materials that are transformed into new functions. For example, the bathroom basin is constructed on an unused old tool desk of a piano maker. The old kitchen has created some problems, such as space inefficiency, the blocking of sunlight from coming inside the rather long yet narrow interior and not to mention the view to the garden that is also blocked. Therefore the old kitchen with the L-form counter was replaced with a new design with a feature of a kitchen island that solves every problem from the old one.
Green Space
The backyard is not too big but big enough to smell the fresh air and to enjoy the sun, apart from the busy urban life outside. When the house was first bought, the garden was not too green. One of the ideas for the garden design was to create herbal-edible garden and to plant a green roof for the shed that catches rainwater. The low height made it possible to enjoy the wonderful green view of the roof from inside the house. The green roof consisted of many layers: two kinds of filter fleece, waterproofing membrane, drainage/ storage grids, growing medium and lastly, a sedum plant layer. And the herbal-edible plants are accommodated inside a handpick-tall wooden plant tank that is built along one side of the garden. The ground surface of the garden is covered by hardwood deck.