Mr. and Mrs. Clymans worked as employees at the Druyts company. They approached Neefs because they were impressed by the house he had built for their director some time before. Their requirements were simple: a house with a living room, kitchen, three bedrooms, bathroom, and garage. Their budget was limited, and their building plot was a triangle of barely 2.5 ares located at the intersection of two streets, with the south in that corner. However, it was situated in a quiet neighborhood without through traffic.
Neefs positioned the house as close as possible to the northern plot boundary and designed a plan that gradually tapers from there to stay within the diagonal building lines of the two other plot boundaries. Neefs took advantage of the offsets to allow ample sunlight into all rooms. He enclosed the successive rooms with an equal number of mutually shifting L-shaped walls, creating openings between them that, like the living room, all face south. The openings all have the same dimensions, 1.40 by 2.47 m, and are fully glazed. The floor-to-ceiling windows give the rooms of this modest house an unusual allure. In fact, they are all pivoting glass doors, providing direct access to the garden from each room.
Despite the volume’s offsets, it became a pure, almost symmetrical organism that turns its back to the north to unfold towards the south.
The design is elementary. The walls are white, the windows black. The refined detailed windows do not stand out. They blend into the dark surface of the glass.
‘Architecture in the Golden Sixties – The Turnhout School, Lannoo Campus, 2012’.
