Compact House Design by Andrew Berman Architect

This 850 square feet unique architectural residential project "Compact House Design" was designed by New York architect Andrew Berman Architect. This small compact homes designed with a writing studio and private library located among the tree in Long Island, New York.

The architect saw the door as a threshold, while the window in the study signified one’s arrival. “As you go from the vertical entry to a horizontal aperture,” Berman says, “the building becomes a volume describing the transition.”



This Compact Homes design is actually more like a tree house than a cottage: Entering the small, high vestibule, one immediately confronts a narrow wood stair leading up to the second-level work space. At the rear of this loftlike expanse, the historian’s desk looks out through a 16-by-7-foot window directly onto a grove of trees with a stream in the near distance.



The home’s unusual copper-clad facade reflects the ever-changing colors of nature. A simple, wood-framed glass door opens to the V-shaped house plan. Angled out are the north and south facades of an ever-expanding interior that’s flooded with natural light through the large windows throughout. The double-height entrance leads to the kitchen and bathroom, and the working and entertainment areas at the read of the home.




Related Books:

Compact Houses: Architecture for the Environment



The houses profiled are designed to make maximum use of the smallest possible footprint in order to protect the environment. The houses profiled here prove that efficiency as well as beautiful, thoughtful design can be had in a tiny setting. Each project includes a case history describing its design challenges and how the architect overcame them, a detailed blueprint for each house, full-color photos of the interior and the exterior, and plans of the layout.

Compact Houses



This exhaustively documented sourcebook will be invaluable to professionals and students of architecture, interior design, interior de-corating, and furniture design. Information is provided on every aspect of the design process from the ground up—floor plans, materials, and specifications—on furniture and fixtures.

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Box House by Alan Chu & Cristiano Kato

Alan Chu & Cristiano Kato designed this small construction with a simple program sited on an island of the North coast of Ilhabela at 100 meters above sea level, next to two enormous rocks, Sao Paulo, Brazil. The wood used on some doors, windows, staircase, shelves and furniture are leftovers used to mold the white box made of reinforced concrete.



The old existing one-story house with stone walls and clay roof tiles becomes a new building with 2 floors. The 3×5 meters white box is supported on one side by an existing retaining wall and on the other by a wall built with stones, a characteristic of local constructions.

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Rustic Canyon Residence by Griffin Enright Architects

Designed by the firm that was founded on the belief that collaboration yields the most innovative, creative, forward-thinking design, Griffin Enright Architects. This Rustic Canyon Residence set out to invert the conventional means of organizing a single family home, taking an existing, highly compartmentalized ranch dwelling and converting it in to a contemporary space for living that allows for expansive open spaces and a welcoming, informal atmosphere. Above these spaces, an existing pitched roof is cut laterally and folded back up in order to blend the interior with the landscape.



This blurring internalizes a hillside garden where an existing, 300 year old Sycamore tree becomes the new centerpiece of the expanded house. While the public areas are open and blend seamlessly with one another, the Library trades openness and informality for introspection and tranquility, anchored by a fireplace that floats in glass with the hillside and ancient tree just beyond.

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Moosmann House by Hermann Kaufmann

This gorgeous small Moosmann House designed by Hermann Kaufmann. In the extremely cramped Situation between two existing single-family homes into a new building for a young family to conceive. In the eastern house to live the parents of building the plant, which together with the positioning of the new building and the two families concerned, entrance was prepared.























The topographical situation of the street allows direct access to the residential level, in the garden to get here on a short outdoor staircase. In the lower floor, about one meter below the garden level, is the sleeping area. The floor is wood construction and will be built through a kitchen toilet box clearly divided, the basement is made of reinforced constructively with the concrete exterior walls are insulated inside.



























With the optimized insulated building envelope, ventilation and comfort with heat reached the house almost passive values, although the building body does not produce the optimal A / V ratio. This project stands as a possible answer to the increasingly important topic of the post-compaction or the exploitation of "residual land".




















































Principal: Moosmann Petra
Project management: DI Christoph Dünser
Planning: Richard Forer
General contractor: Berchtold Holzbau GmbH & Co KG, Wolfurt
Girder planning: DI Markus Flatz, Bregenz
Completition: 2002

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Cassels House designed by Riego & Bauer

Modern homes with imposing walls of glass, stainless steel accents, crooked angles, black-and-white exteriors or whimsical shapes have struck a pose in this traditional, tight-knit neighbourhood of Toronto's historic Beach area. This house was designed and built to sell by Riego & Bauer. The objective was to offer buyers a newly contructed house with a contemporary design at a competitive price.

The new house took a while to sell, whether because of the price, the small size or the striking design. Initially on the lookout for a condo, the owner, Richard Godin, was attracted to the 1,000-sq.-ft. home "because it was different, first and foremost. It appears to be paper thin and like a fishbowl. It's all glass - it's not for a bashful person."





















The design for this small two-bedroom house fits into the neighbourhood while still being contemporary. With an exciting and approachable design the house relates to the tightly packed cottages with peaked roofs without replicating them.

In contrast to the solid walls on both sides of the house, the front and back faces are entirely glass, in order to maximize natural light and give the modest interior spaces the impression of being larger than they are.


















Reigo & Bauer recently filled a small empty lot tucked between a row of houses near Woodbine Avenue and Kingston Road. The property was only 16½x55 feet so the architects approached the design much as they would for a condo, building a tall, thin white house, with black side walls, whose front is almost entirely glass; passersby can easily gaze Into the upper and lower rooms.

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Simple Box House in Spain by Murado & Elvira

This ultra modern house designed by the architects at Murado & Elvira. Espejo House located in Badajoz, Spain, puts a contemporary twist on a basic rectangular residence, incorporating rounded corners and a sleek, metal-clad envelope that lends the structure a look of clean simplicity. The house is like a box wrapped in white metal lines with rounded corners. The client desire to simultaneous contemplate the fire and the sunset, turning nature into a domestic object of affection. Sliding doors of pine wood act as shutters and are configured as a protective skin.
















In the living room and the porch, light is filtered by the sliding doors and is screened through the roof. The color is introduced as an accent on certain points, like in the bathroom with a turquoise screen creating a turquoise atmosphere.






























Butting up against the cool metal, sliding doors of rustic pine act as shutters, and can be completely opened or closed, depending on your mood or the weather on any given day. On further exploration of this cool design, white is a major player in its interior design. Vivid punches of color come in unexpected places – the turquoise bathroom, and the stop-dead-in-your-tracks red kitchen.

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Hanse Colani Rotor House

Efficient Compact Living space with four rooms in one house.

This is the spatially smart dwelling and compact "efficient" living Hanse Rotor House that is made up of a large open living room surrounding a central core rotating room containing tiny efficient versions of a home’s essential rooms: bedroom, kitchen and bathroom. Designed by Luigi Colani that has created this space-saving house with a six square meter cylinder.



















View of the cylinder from the living room

You can controlled everything using a remote control device, you can rotate the rooms around to bring whatever room you want into view of the main living room. This Hanse Rotor House designed for young professionals who need an efficient, space-saving starter home, the Rotor House is a nice model of compact living space.












































Inside the bathroom

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Alaria Residence by Barry Peterson, Architect

This refreshingly simple, small and crude, yet feel spacious and light-filled of Alaria Residence project was designed by Deliberate Design (Barry Peterson, Architect) for their client at Sausalito CA (Hurricane Gulch). This small residence that is build for thier client Len and Eli Alaria has 1200 sf area with no expensive finishes. The house is made of common lumber and common metals.



































































* Project Name: Alaria Residence
* Client: Len and Eli Alaria
* Project Type: Very small residence
* Principal Designer/s: Deliberate Design + Architecture
* Design Team: Barry Peterson, James Godbe, David Kallmeyer
* Location of site: Sausalito, CA (Hurricane Gulch)
* Contractor/s: Phil Kline
* Date of completion of project: 2005.

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