A House Designed To Resemble A Butterfly, With Perfectly Aligned Features
Some see restrictions as deal breaks but others see them as challenges that they need to overcome. When an area imposes a limit for the footprint that a house can have, that’s something an architect can work with. In fact, it can be the thing that sets in motion an amazing plan, being the catalyst for a unique design that wouldn’t have otherwise existed. We actually something specific in mind when we talk about these things: a residence called House Z-M which was built in 2013 by Dhoore Vanweer Architecten.
The house is located in Belgium and offers a total of 410 square meters of living space even though the maximum allowed footprint in this particular wooden area is 250 square meters. Placed in a residential park, the house is surrounded by nature and other great structures. The architects wanted to allow the house to blend in so they used mirrored panels for some of the sections.
Still, the house is nowhere near conventional. Since the client was a butterfly collector, the architects managed to create something quite unique: a house that has a floor plan based on the morphology of a butterfly. This design goes something like this: the body and the two wings of the butterfly are represented on the ground floor in the form of a kitchen and dining area, a lounge space and an office while the upper floor houses the sleeping area.
There’s also another very interesting detail about the design of this house. The entire project is based on a grid size of 1,2 meters which means that every wall and every floor tile are aligned with the grid and that every height is at 60 cm and every width at 120 cm or a multiple of these numbers. You can’t really tell that without carefully analyzing the design of the house but it’s a quirky fact that makes this project stand out.