Small House With a Great View | A1 Architects

This home, called Small House With a Great View by the architects, also has a great layout. It was designed by A1 Architects for a family with two young children. Located on a hill overlooking a village near Prague, the site offers pastoral views of the countryside below and the nearby Tocník castle. The architects followed the local building tradition of modest gable-roofed houses. While the exterior is attractive and welcoming, it is the interior layout that really caught our attention. The house has only 115 m² (1,238 ft²) of interior floor area but A1 Architects were able to design a small floor plan that packs in a lot of living space, and it is worth having a look at the floor plans to see how they did it.

The living areas are on the ground floor. The combined living, dining and kitchen area seems very generously sized. The adjacent hall to the stairs is wide enough to provide space for an upright piano. In addition, the architects included a nice-sized entry foyer with a powder room to one side and plenty of storage on the other. Very often designers of small houses will resort to having the main entrance open right into the living area, and the worst designs don’t even include a nearby coat closet. A separate foyer is a nice feature that provides for more privacy when strangers show up at the door, gives room to remove and store outerwear, and makes the powder room more private.

Three bedrooms and a bathroom are upstairs. The bathroom is quite big with two sinks and space for a chair. The bedrooms have cathedral ceilings, and the children’s rooms have ladders going up to a play loft. An extra-wide hallway runs along the view side of the house but the space is not wasted. A twenty foot long desk is built in, providing plenty of space for a home office and for doing homework and crafts. The long low window offers panoramic views of the countryside while working.

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Photographs courtesy of A1 Architects. Via ArchDaily.

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