Contemporary design combined with natural materials like wood and stone, shapes one modern and friendly looking house like Panaiotovi’s passive house.
The house is situated in the south suburbs of Plovdiv, in the new housing estate “Belomorski”, which is marked by plain ground and windy climate.
The project provokes with, on the face of it, the full freedom in design, result of the plainness of the ground and the small scale building development.
Starting with the passive house principles, we separated the volume of the unheated garage from the volume of the house with the lobby in between.
Secondly, we should find the perfect location of the house and design the automobile and pedestrian approach to the building. The presence of a huge walnut-tree, which we wanted to keep, together with the necessity of unshaded south elevation and close proximity of the garage to the street, resulted in locating the house centrally on the plot.
For ensuring the easiest automobile approach, we rotated the garage volume towards the street, which made the impression of separating the house and the garage volumes stronger.
Taking in mind all the requirements of our client for a spacious and bright living-room with high ceiling, east terrace with BBQ and summer kitchen and entrance beyond the roof plain, we decided to unify all activities under one roof. So, we designed a roof, which sheltered all the activities necessary for the house. Because of the fact, that the different activities required different room height, we designed a huge roof sloping towards the lowest rooms (the single-stored garage on the northwest and the ground terrace on the east). One of our client’s requirements was the optimal energy generation by solar electricity. We used the southeast roof for placing the photovoltaic panels. The difference between the south slope of the photovoltaic panels and the southeast slope of the roof plain resulted in the perception of the PV panels as “open gills”.
The pedestrian approach to the building is from the northeast, crossing the unheated lobby. The approach is marked by a wavy wall along the pathway, which penetrates into the lobby, indicating the location of the main entrance. The lobby is a bright and spacious premise with high curtain walls and with the possibility of opening and integrating its volume to the north yard, which is dense planted with high-rise greenery.
The measured values of the energy demand, reached through designing and calculating in PHPP for each house are the following:
- Specific space heat demand: 12,6 kWh/m2 annually;
- Primary energy demand: 80 kWh/m2 annually;
- Energy conservation by solar electricity: 96 kWh/m2 annually.
Sq. Area: 350 m2
Designer: Studio APXE
Design Team: arch. G. Nikolov, arch. S. Draganova
Investor: Panaiotov family