Conversion of a 1940s Workers’ Villa

The house belongs to a protected complex of identical villas built in the 1940s for workers of the national railway — a repeated type whose form cannot be freely altered. It originally held a single inhabitable floor above a lower level of cellar and garage, each reached independently from the outside. The conversion treats that lower level not as ancillary space but as a second full register of the house: a bedroom and a studio are inserted there, and a new entrance is built to reorganise the vertical circulation and unify access to both floors.

To make the lower level habitable, its floor had to be excavated to reach the ceiling height the new rooms required, and existing windows were enlarged or supplemented with new openings to bring in light. The resulting change in level is not concealed: a finish of sand-washed concrete marks the height gained in both the bedroom and the studio, keeping the trace of the original floor visible within the finished rooms.

The same sand-washed concrete runs across the new floor spaces throughout the lower level, including the entrance. But the entrance itself is enclosed in wood frames rather than concrete — a shift from the solidity of the concrete that lines the floor and lower walls of the bedroom and studio, marking the entrance as a distinct, lighter threshold between the two levels it now joins.

The change in level is registered on the exterior as well. On the original façade, a coloured socle already marks the separation between the existing ground floor and the new lower level; the extension continues that logic through a symmetrical offset of the lower timber fins. The extension is finished in burnt timber, setting a blackened, contemporary volume against the original one.

The conversion does not resolve the difference between old and new so much as stage it in material: concrete that keeps the memory of a former floor level, timber that marks where the house has been added to. What results is a protected, decades-old typology given a legible, contemporary layer without erasing the datum it was built from.