The young family who bought this house were leaving Amsterdam behind and looking for more space in this fully detached suburban home, but they didn’t want to leave their Amsterdam lifestyle behind. Whilte we first explored expanding the house to add an extra guest bedroom, we decided that the focus should instead be on opening up the ground floor of the house so that the kitchen connected through a dinning room to the living room.

The house was originally built in the 1930’s as two separate houses and while there had been a number of renovations over the years including joining the houses together, there were many vestigial hallways and dead spaces which needed to be cleared away in order to allow the house to function for the young family, and especially to turn the house from a series of small rooms and corridors into a space that could serve as a central party hub for friends visiting from around the country.

At the same time, we wanted to improve the sustainability of the project, wrapping the whole building in a layer of insulation on the outside, adding insulation to the roof, preparing the electrical systems for future solar panels, and installing an underfloor heating system that can be connected to the regional heating network.