A month after the King’s visit to Turnhout, architect Carli Vanhout submitted a detailed site plan and proposal for 28 social family homes, with garages, on Rozenlaan in Gierle In the preliminary design from a few months earlier, garden sheds were still included, with external dimensions of 3 m by 5 m. In the façades of the same preliminary design, we see the remarkable low-placed windows that extend to the ground floor level. Vanhout had already applied this motif a year earlier in the Hoppenbrouwers residence. The coal cellar suggests that coal stoves were still the intended heating solution for the estate at that time.
The architect had previously drawn up a plan with the ‘land to be purchased by the company’. It is a plot located at the back, connecting Kloosterstraat with Doolstraat and easily integrating into the fabric of the small village centre. Vanhout’s great merit lies in his new urban planning approach. Although the density, at 30 homes per hectare, is approximately the same as the previous estate, there is a spacious public green zone. This zone is centrally located and, with a width of 26 m, is at an ideal scale to both separate the rows of houses and create an intimate outdoor space. The zones are: public green space with footpaths, the homes, private gardens with garages on the sides, and finally the roads. One consequence of this zoning method is the introduction of the cul-de-sac. The actual gardens are situated between the garages. Any privacy issues were to be resolved through planting. Between the garage and the kitchen is a small courtyard, which is further enclosed by a 2 m high shared wall and a 1 m high wall that encloses the garden. The kitchen door is connected to the garage door by a concrete canopy.
The four-bedroom homes are located on the ends of the rows, a solution that would often be applied in later estates. This is one of the first TMH estates with central heating. The boiler was not located in a separate room or in the garage, but in a corner of the kitchen. The cellar has been eliminated and replaced with a cool storage room. Each home gets an extra toilet, specifically in the bathroom.
In this estate, Vanhout used theBrutalist forms even more exuberantly than in Oud-Turnhout. The concrete lintels above the windows merge into the cornice and a band at the level of the first floor. These long lintels allow Vanhout to create an L-shaped window across the entire width of each bedroom. Protruding concrete blocks mark the divisions between the homes, both in the front and rear façades. We also see these blocks on the first-floor terrace of the end houses. To ensure privacy for the living room in the front façade, a floating concrete beam was planned next to each front door. Between the building permit application and construction, this was replaced with a brick partition wall.
