A Courtyard House

A Courtyard House sets out to bring the garden inside, and takes its brief almost literally: a house and garden its owners intend to be able to live in their whole life. That single condition — long-term accessibility held in view from the start — reorganises the plan around difference rather than a single shared centre of gravity. The two main occupants, one an artist and one in business, and both grandparents to a family that gathers here when it is in town, keep distinct interests and routines, so the house is arranged to let those lives run in parallel and only converge when they need to.

The organising device is a loose nine-square grid that breaks the ground into four quadrants of occupation. Each quadrant is left free to answer its own programmatic and climatic brief through its openings, outlooks and roof profile, so no two parts of the house read quite the same. What holds them together is the centre: the kitchen sits at the heart of the plan as the collective space for everyone, with gardens set around it and each interior paired with an equivalent piece of outdoor room. Above, a second level carries separate sleeping and entertainment quarters, so the extended family can be housed without folding back into the primary living areas.

Structure and material follow a constraint written into the site — a 1918 covenant requiring all visible walls and roofs to be tile, brick or concrete. The house takes this at face value: double concrete block walls on the ground level, rendered brick to level 01 and the visible roofs. Between the two palettes runs a band of pale blue steel, a parallel flange channel that reappears across the project as lintel, rainhead, awning and soft boundary in turn. It is a single continuous detail asked to do many things, and in that economy it carries a recurring MI—JI ambition — to make a lot from little.

The building's form is also its environmental strategy. All available roof space is given over to photovoltaic panels tied to a multi-battery store and car charging, gas is disconnected from the site entirely, and heating and cooling run on a heat pump drawing from the same array. The massing is tuned to suit: the double-storey portion is placed to the south to limit overshadowing of the panels, which also keeps the most-used northern rooms low and at a human scale. The landscape, by SL.ug, was worked as a major element rather than a surround, and the whole site — paths inside and out, thresholds set flush — is detailed for wheelchair access, making good on the brief's long horizon. The contractor, DIMPAT, carried the joinery and carpentry that the scheme's precision depends on.

What the house finally proposes is a way of holding difference together without flattening it. By dividing the ground into quadrants and pairing each room with a garden, A Courtyard House lets separate lives keep their own light, outlook and roof, then draws them back to a shared kitchen at the centre — architecture that orders variety rather than resolving it away.