The site is eleven metres wide and thirty-two deep, hemmed by blank party walls on both long sides. A conventional house here would be a tube with windows at each end and a dim middle where the family keeps its coats. Architects Hug & Sabel refused the tube. They drew a rectangle that fills the plot completely and then subtracted four squares from it.1Footnote 1: Each courtyard is 4.5 by 4.5 metres, the minimum the engineers allowed before the roof became structurally awkward.
The result is a plan that reads like a stamp: a solid field with four voids punched out in a grid. Every room touches at least one void. The kitchen touches two. Nobody in the house is ever more than three metres from a window, and no window faces a neighbour.
It would be easy to call the courtyards gardens, but only one of them has anything planted in it. A single field maple stands in the north-west void, chosen because it is the tree the owners’ daughter could name.2Footnote 2: The other three courtyards are paved in the same grey stone as the floors inside, so that the threshold between room and sky is a change of temperature rather than material. The remaining three are empty, and the emptiness is the point. They are rooms without ceilings. Rain falls into them and is led away under the floor; snow collects and is left alone.
Living here means living with weather at close range. In January the paved courts hold a square of frost each until mid-morning. In July the maple throws a shadow that travels across the kitchen table like a slow clock hand. The architects talk about this with a certain pride, but the owners talk about it more plainly: the house tells you what time it is.
The construction is nothing special, and is better for it. Load-bearing brick, lime-rendered, under a flat roof of timber joists. The courtyards are lined in the same render, so that the outside walls of the voids are technically inside walls that happen to be wet sometimes. Maintenance is a bucket and a broom.3Footnote 3: The owners report sweeping each court roughly once a week, less in winter. The maple drops leaves into only one of them, by design.
What is special is the discipline. Four identical voids could easily have become four different ideas: a pool here, a terrace there. Hug & Sabel held the line. The house is one gesture repeated, and because it is repeated, it stops being a gesture and becomes a structure. You stop noticing the courtyards after a week, the owners say. You only notice when you visit a house that does not have them.