Town Houses For Bikers

Following on from my last post, the wonderfully named Love Architecture have designed a townhouse project in Tokyo for people who love their motorcycles.

A very simply designed house with the following layout. The ground floor is for the bike, at the back of the ground floor is the bathroom (and not a whole lot of privacy-in the last picture you can see the toilet from the street!) Stacked above that on the first and second floors are the kitchen and bedroom.

Stair Porn

I was pointed to this website the other day, www.stairporn.org it's a blog all about stairs, regularly updated it has lots of links to the architects and designers who have created them. The photo above is one of the stairs featured on the site from a scheme called Town Houses for Bikers the by a Japanese firm Love Architecture Inc

The Layer House

The house is made up of pre-cast concrete strips, stacked unevenly to allow stairs, furniture and floors to be inserted in the gaps. It's tight, claustrophobic, yet entirely open. There are no internal doors, apart from the sliding doors to the toilet.

Passing the tree in the courtyard, that brings irregular form to this otherwise linear exterior, you enter on a landing, where you can either traverse to the bedroom, or head downstairs to the basement where a formal dining room and bathroom are housed.

Climbing up you reach the living room and galley kitchen with a steep set of stairs taking you to the roof deck, of which half is a glazed panel to bathe the main stairwell with light. The front of the house is a larged glass panel to let more light into the house and the rear wall has smaller window striped by the precast concrete.