NUB designed by Amunt, After a long search, a couple with two children purchased a townhouse in a workers? housing estate in Stuttgart. The house ? which originally dates from the 1930s and was reconstructed in the 1950s ? is built on a sloping site typical for Stuttgart. With its small, roughly square plan of 6.85 x 7.30 meters, it rises like a tower four stories above the property. The house is entered from a small front yard on the north side. The ground floor was too small to accommodate a kitchen, living room, and dining area for the family and also had no direct access to the garden on the south side.
Photography: Brigida González
The intimate garden could only be reached by taking a narrow, steep stair into the basement and then walking through the very low-ceilinged laundry room. So we proposed to convert the garden level basement into living space. To do so, we removed much of the entry-level floor: the cinder concrete slab from the 1950s was partly demolished and replaced by a reinforced concrete ring beam supporting a floor slab with voids to either side.
The resulting platform for the new, gallerylike living room is one step higher than the original floor, differentiating it from the entry area and the adjacent work alcove. This also gives the living room more intimacy and yields more headroom for the new kitchen beneath. A newly inserted wooden stair leads down to the garden level, where the kitchen adjoins a double-height dining area with a room-wide bench t...