Tsavkisi, Georgia, 2005 for Milestone_next and project : tsavlisi
A house on a slope is arranged so that its public rooms face the street, forming a massive guest façade with a clearly legible entrance—an intentional reinterpretation of the classical mansion in a minimalist idiom.
The whole house is effectively mounted onto a stair that rises along the same incline, so moving through it feels like a natural continuation of walking uphill across the site itself.
As one ascends, guest spaces gradually give way to private ones; privacy is produced not only by enclosure but by the topographic rise, which progressively shields the upper rooms from outside views and from the social intensity below. At the highest point, an expanded master suite is developed for a young yet mature couple, ready to leave children and noise beneath and embrace the pleasures of full seclusion.
Each zone in the house has an outdoor counterpart: the kitchen façade continues as an exterior guest kitchen, the living room as a courtyard with a pool, the children’s room as a play court, and the large master bath as an outdoor pool.
Each of these spaces is protected from outsiders and from direct sightlines because they follow the ascent of the slope and inherit its shielding section. We call these spaces “garden rooms,” or “rooms with sky,” and they extend the thematic lineage of the classical baroque mansion in a contemporary architectural syntax.
The façade cantilevers above two large parking spaces, protecting the cars from precipitation and heat gain.
More broadly, the house is conceived as a passive environmental system: the only southern window is filtered by the crown of a tree, the terraces are protected from overheating, and the cascading sequence of rooms supports natural ventilation.
Windows are positioned not simply to admit light, but to open and frame the best views we selected: the crest of the nearest wooded hill and Mount Mtatsminda in central Tbilisi.
house for a family with two children is inspired by the traditional Georgian darbazi house, with its high pitched roof and central light well. In a darbazi, the roof structure is formed by the sequential rotation of each new ring of logs over the previous one.
This became the conceptual basis for the project’s key move: rotating the second floor by 14.76 degrees relative to the first.
This rotation made it possible, on the one hand, to optimally shape the courtyard and parking spaces with the ground floor, and on the other hand, to orient one roof slope ideally for solar panels, whose increased performance due to this rotation makes it possible to supply the entire house with electricity directly and with heat via a heat pump.
The same rotation also allowed us to form a canopy over the parking spaces and a protected passage to the main entrance and the kitchen entrance without substantial cantilevers.
The rotation is organized around a central light well, as in a darbazi—only here that role is played by the stair core, which also becomes an internal winter garden. The first floor “flows” down the slope, and the rooms follow the logic of descent: from the low, compact service spaces of bathroom and storage at the entrance, through an amphitheater stair for collective film viewing, toward the dining and living areas, which open to the terrace and a wooded courtyard.
The logic of several cascading courtyards continues the interior sequence: parking spaces give way to a guest courtyard by the kitchen, which in turn gives way to a private pool. Additional load-bearing walls supporting the second floor shield the private zones from the views and noise of the settlement street.
The alternation of large glazed openings and solid walls continues the overall theme of calibrating openness and privacy. Toward the neighboring courtyard, located at close range, the house presents a massive textured concrete wall whose apparent monotony becomes pictorial through the sculptural rotation of the upper volume and multi-level planting, recalling the overgrown, fissured, terraced rocks nearby. Toward the guest courtyard, the house opens with the kitchen door.
The living room with a fireplace opens onto the pool, which also casts moving reflections of light onto its ceiling and illuminates the room without overexposure at noon. Finally, the children’s rooms open to the broad panorama of the settlement, the valley below, and the Bioli resort, while the master bedroom acquires its own panoramic terrace with a mini-fireplace built into the chimney of the main fireplace, and a developed bathroom protected from neighbors’ views yet open to the mountain panorama and framing the TV tower on the summit of Mount Mtatsminda in central Tbilisi.
This is how we understand dwelling: at once in the full privacy and pleasures of a private house, and at the same time in direct visual relation to the very center of the capital.
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