Afra House

Afra House project started as a renovation of a very old two-story house located in Lavasan, Tehran, Iran. The house was on top of a property with a split in the land, creating rough access to the house from the entrance. The main objectives of the project was to convert the two separate levels of the house into a duplex, redefine the accessibility to the main building from the entrance at the street level and finally adding a number of spaces that are necessary to a vacation house, such as an outdoor swimming pool, a room for the caretaker of the house, a hot tub and an office space. The strategy to facilitate the accessibility of the house was to place an elevator near the entrance to get to the top level and a small bridge connecting the elevator platform to the first-floor balcony of the house. The new circulation defined primary access via the elevator and the bridge, and secondary access through the landscape. The shift of the main entrance created a flipped typology were the public functions, which are usually at the ground level moved to the first level, and the ground level housed the more private functions of the villa. The split-level in the land created an opportunity to form a three-story volume near the entrance providing the additional spaces. This new building contains care taker’s room at the ground level, office at the first level and a changing area and a hot tub at the second level near the swimming pool. These spaces are accessible from the elevator that starts next o the parking and reaches to the top of the added building at the level of the bridge. The geometry of the bridge generated based on the location of each end, and the locations of the existing trees in the site. The new building was formed in a way to create an entrance area at the bottom, increase view towards the valley for the office, and increase the view from the pool deck and to create a sharp viewing-deck corner at the top. As a whole, the project consists of two old and new volumes, connected by a bridge that navigates over the steep and contrasted landscape. Having the swimming pool on one side and the garden on the other. Two levels of the landscape have different characteristics which could also be described as one being more public consisted of parking spaces, the entrance and care taker’s room, while the other works as a more private yard containing the swimming pool, access to the office and the green garden.

Design:

Adib Khaeez and Ramtin Taherian in Collaboration with Raavi Studio

Construction:

Raavi Studio

Project Year: 2017-2018

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