Long Section

A hard lot: thirty feet of frontage, a hundred feet of depth, neighbors tight on both flanks. The developer who owned it before had approvals for six units and no daylight in four of them. Anagram treated the depth as the subject. The house is organized as a single long section, a continuous route from the street to the rear garden that steps up four times over its length, half a level at a time. You never climb a full flight and you are never in a hallway, because the route is the house. Living, dining, study and the primary bedroom each occupy one landing of the sequence. Light comes from above, since it cannot come from the sides. Three lightwells puncture the roof at the points where the section steps, and each is lined in cast glass block that turns direct sun into something diffuse and faintly green by the time it reaches the floor. At the deepest point of the plan, seventy feet from the street, there is enough daylight to read by at four in the afternoon. The concrete is fair-faced and the formwork joints line up with the stair risers, which is the kind of thing that costs a great deal and that no visitor consciously notices. The flamed granite floor runs the entire length without a threshold or a change of material. The fourth bedroom is at street level with its own entrance, drawn for a parent, usable as a practice.