House With Unique Furniture

Dutch architect and designer Rolf Bruggink’s latest project, House of Rolf, is a renovated 19th century carriage house with a modern interior made entirely of reconstituted materials from a separate building on the same property.

The former carriage house, which was originally built in 1895 in the garden of a wealthy aristocrat in the stately Maliebaan district of Utrecht, was expanded in the 1950s by a 200 m² wooden outbuilding. This building, which was demolished by Bruggink after the property was bought in 2011, provided the recovered materials for the construction of a new sculptural and functional structure that forms the beating heart of the 50 m² coach house. The result is a construction of architectural forms that are rich and unusual in their variety of texture and matter.

The finished house is an impressive example of how to make the most of the limited space. The interior is divided into three zones. The first zone remains completely empty, so that the original coach house can be fully experienced. The middle zone contains a structure that stands completely free from the coach house shell, so that one can easily see beyond from the entrance. This second zone houses the kitchen, the bedroom, the toilet, the shower, the bathroom and the office. Positioning this sculptural structure in the middle of the house creates a front, middle and rear subdivision. This functional object divides and connects the room at the same time.

In the third zone there is a second structure which, together with the structure in the middle zone, forms the sculptural living space of the Rolf house. On the back wall, a new large-format panorama window was cut out of the shell of the coach house so that light can flow into the room. This is the only intervention in the original building envelope.