Private residence · Surabaya

DA House

A classical house, and glass divided to match it.

Architect

Julius Architect

Interior

Valvonne

System

TECHNAL Topaze

DA House is a large classical house in Surabaya, and the TECHNAL Topaze in it is doing something the rest of this portfolio does not. Instead of the slim single panes that run through most of ARTEMI’s work, the glazing here is divided into a fine grid, dark bars against pale panelled walls. It suits the house. The rooms are corniced, panelled and hung with pictures, arranged in the traditional way rather than opened into one another, and a frameless wall of glass would have argued with all of it. The best of it is the living room, where a full-height gridded screen opens onto a courtyard of rock and trained pine.

Glass to the Court

The living room gives a whole wall to gridded glazing, and what it opens onto is a small enclosed court: a stone wall, boulders, and a pine trained against them, visible from nowhere else in the house. The screens are dark and the rooms behind them are lit warm, so after dark the glass works in both directions at once. You get the court through it and the room in it.

The Grid, Repeated

The same detail runs through the house at every scale. In the stair hall it becomes a single tall window, dark bars against a pale wall, with the ironwork of the balustrade picking up the same weight of line. In the dining room it is a black wall of glass after dark. One detail, repeated, is most of what holds a large and quite decorated house together.

The Rooms

The interior is unapologetically classical: panelling, cornices, marble underfoot, chandeliers over a long table, pictures hung rather than built in. The glazing is asked to sit inside that language instead of breaking it, which is why it is divided rather than clear.