CONCEPT
On a site with limited space – where local architecture regulations are restricted too - the task of rebuilding a non-nostalgic, contemporary house in a historic town centre is not an easy one. The most important request from the client was to bring more daylight inside the small urban house. At the same time local heritage authorities demanded a typical sloping roof, these conditions made it ideal for the use of VELUX roof windows.
Regarding functionality the house has a simple and classical design with all modern basic facilities fully integrated that the client would need now and in the future. The house is like a reversed summer cottage. The house has been created as an overnight city home in the capital for a senior couple, who normally lives in the Slovenian countryside without the possibilities offered by the city. The townhouse brings the client closer to that part of life – from live jazz concerts to delicate restaurants and bar experiences – and thus functions as a private ‘hotel apartment’.
SITE/LOCATION
Just like the surrounding, small town houses in the Krakovo neighbourhood in the centre of beautiful and historic Ljubljana, XXS House fits in elegantly in a modest and yet different way. Krakovo is a quiet part of the city with no other open-air places than the narrow lanes crossing each other, creating a kind of pseudo-squares.
The house is originally one half of a stable and former warehouse with tiny windows. The volume of the house after the rebuilding, defined by the local cultural heritage authority, is exactly the same as before, apart from a more contemporary way of designing the windows.
‘I used to live in the house, when I was an architecture student (before transforming it into the XXS House). In fact, my parents happen to be the clients of the XXS house and bought it in the mid- 90s as an investment’, explains Aljosa Dekleva, one half of the architecture company Dekleva-Gregoric Arhitekti. ‘This was especially fortunate because the school of architecture is situated just 200 meters away’. windows.