Ground HouseFlorida

The commission: Ground House in Florida

A four-bedroom house in Florida with 8,306 sq ft of built-up area. The programme is a full one for four bedrooms: a formal living room and a dining hall for receiving guests, a private cinema and a home gym, a rooftop pantry, a guard room, a powder room, staff accommodation and a laundry. The scope was architecture, interiors and landscape as one commission, so the travertine of the street front, the pools behind the house and the master bedroom were drawn by one team, and the same pairing of stone and timber runs from the boundary wall to the bedroom panelling.

The house was drawn by LKYOOB from its studio in Dubai, one of seven commissions in the United States on the studio's project schedule, and it is shown here as design visualisations.

What the site sets

The visualisations draw a flat site with two faces. The street side is a car court under a cantilevered canopy, travertine walls and a boundary wall with palms behind it, the whole house reading as one horizontal roof line above the wall. The garden side is glazed rooms under deep timber soffits, opening onto a long pool with a stone deck and onto a smaller courtyard pool that the living room steps down to.

Two general points follow from what is drawn. Glazing on the garden side needs the overhangs the deep soffits provide on the faces that take the afternoon sun, and a pool deck with loungers needs shade and planting to be usable through the summer, which the drawings answer with the roof itself, an umbrella and the tropical planting around the water. The programme sets the rest: 8,306 sq ft has to hold four bedrooms and the rooms around them, from the formal living room and the dining hall to the cinema, the gym and the rooftop pantry, and the rooms that face the pools are the ones drawn to open onto them.

How the house answers it

The street front is travertine and timber under a deep flat roof, the canopy over the cars carried from the same soffit, so the house reads as one line above the boundary wall and the palms. The garden front is the same roof over glass: the living room opens to the courtyard pool, and the long pool sits on a stone deck with loungers and an umbrella among palms and strelitzia.

The master bedroom carries the palette inward: a channelled boucle headboard set between walnut panels and woven bronze, a chandelier of brass rods above the bed, and rust velvet armchairs beside a stone side table at the window. Stone and timber hold from the street front to the bedroom wall, so the house reads as one material idea inside and out, and the pools are the rooms the glazed side faces.

Where the project stands

Ground House is a design study: the images on this page are visualisations rendered from the studio's drawings, and none of them is a photograph of a built house. The schedule records it in Florida with the area and programme stated above. The studio's other United States studies, in Miami and in Austin, Texas, are linked below.