P7 House

The house makes a deliberate inversion: the largest, most generous room is not on the ground floor. It is below it. The basement dining and drawing room, 578 square feet of open plan facing a carved courtyard through full-height glass, is where the house comes alive. Beside it, a separate sunken light well pulls daylight into the basement on its own. Two devices for the same problem: how to make underground space feel lived in rather than buried.

The courtyard is open to sky at basement level, a 241 square foot cut in the ground that the basement is organized around. Above it, the ground floor holds the everyday life of the house. The first floor holds the bedrooms and a 490 square foot walkway that is less a corridor than a gallery: a room whose purpose is movement.

The house took three years to build. The material palette explains why. Polished raw gray concrete runs underfoot throughout. Custom terrazzo, an ivory base with dark coal flakes designed for this project, appears alongside it. Black marble in the wet areas only. Ceilings plain white, fixtures black. Rosewood on every door, every piece of built-in joinery, every surface that asks for warmth against the rawness of the concrete. Windows in black aluminum, double-glazed with black tinted glass that absorbs light instead of reflecting it, disappearing into the frame. Door frames detailed with reveals: the frame recessed, the door appearing to float. Every junction drawn before it was built. Three years was not long enough to rush it.