Mr. and Mrs. Thomas, both mathematicians working in education, approached Neefs for the design of their home after he was highly recommended by Hugo Criekemans. They had a 10-are building plot at the corner of two streets in Vosselaar, with ground level situated 90 cm above street level. Their requirements were: a house with a spacious living room, four bedrooms and two bathrooms, a double garage, and a study that needed to be visually connected to the living room. They wanted a contemporary house, simply modern and functional but not too special, preferably without slanted or curved walls.
The first preliminary design that Neefs presented (in April 1973) was constructed entirely of straight walls at right angles to each other. He situated the house on the northeastern side of the plot so that it overlooked a spacious garden on the southwestern side. The house turned out quite spacious, with the living room being an elongated, 4-meter-high space that was partly oriented south and partly north, and still featured a conversation pit. The kitchen occupied a central position, overlooking the garden. The clients weren’t entirely happy with this proposal, and presumably neither was Neefs himself. They asked him: ‘How would you do it if you could do exactly as you pleased, as if it were for yourself?’ Neefs apparently found himself in the situation he described in his interview with Mil De Kooning as follows:
Sometimes I would visit my clients with one preliminary design on paper and another in mind. During the conversation, I would show through sketching what the other possibility could be. Through the approval and enthusiasm this generates, you get carte blanche to try out the second, stronger design. You need to be able to ‘take the clients along with you,’ and that usually worked out well.
The new project, which he presented three months later, showed a true transformation. It had become a very compact plan that, in his own words, had taken the shape of a lemon. It was situated in the same location as the previous one but turned its convex, almost closed back to the north to open up completely to the south. Despite the curved walls and lines, the clients could fully embrace this plan. Neefs developed it and completed the building permit application in July 1973.
The entrance to the house is situated on the north side, with the garage door at the right end. The entrance, which pedestrians reach via a short path along the facade, is in the middle. The angular hallway provides access to the study on the left and, via a small staircase, to the living room on the right, which is 90 cm higher. The living room unfolds with a sweeping gesture towards the south and the southwestern garden. It is a generous space that extends over a width of 11 m between the kitchen and fireplace corner. However, its glass wall does not follow the curve of the cornice but runs straight at a 30-degree angle to the inner wall, tapering towards the east and appearing deeper than it actually is.
The dining area is a beautiful, more intimate space. Shielded by a section of the curved exterior wall, it has an inward view, through a floor-level window, into the lower-situated study. Conversely, this room looks upward, skimming over the floor into the living space. A remarkable feature is that several rooms in this house take the form of a cyclic quadrilateral in plan, meaning an (irregular) quadrilateral whose four vertices lie on a circle. This always occurs when two opposite angles of the figure are right angles, regardless of the measure of the other two angles. A space based on such a quadrilateral thus always has an intrinsic center, the midpoint of the circumscribed circle. This applies here to the kitchen, the study, a bedroom, and the toilet. When the clients pointed this out to Neefs, he appeared unaware of it.
Despite, or perhaps because of its unusual shape, the house fits meaningfully within the existing plot division. With its curved rear, it marks the street corner where it rises. It softens the sharp edge of that corner and creates a connection between both street directions.
‘Architecture in the Golden Sixties – The Turnhout School, Lannoo Campus, 2012’.
