From ordinary folks, to designers, and architects, if we were given a chance to envision our dream homes without ever considering the site characteristics certainly all of our home design choices will be based on a favorable site conditions, and that is of approaching and accessing the site at the front side with your home facing towards the gate, or on the worst case scenario accessing it from aside. 

Well that wasn’t neither of the cases in this home design project, the site was positioned almost at the bottom of the hill, with the road on the right hand side propelling you from uphill directly down into the site. The site had a split level of about a meter in the middle, facing a forest hill with a sun tracking from dawn to night right in front of it, with absolutely no possibility of other gate positioning, this was a site that wasn’t about to be told how to be and couldn’t wait for someone stupid enough to attempt it on a budget it had. 

Envisioning the house with the client it became clear that the house will have to face downhill towards the forest hill, which means the first thing you will see as you travel down towards it will be the back of the house. Which was a real challenge to us since the backyards of most traditional homes are like hidden spaces where we put away stuff with things like; garbage cans, washing lines, carports, vegetable gardens, and many other broken useless junk we no longer use.  

But the real challenge was that the designs of most traditional home’s backside is like looking at the backside of any object you can think of...it’s just so not the selling point. So having that now as front of the house, “first impression” was something it wouldn’t even dare to dream of.  

So we came up with a structural design that had a ‘Mirror Effect’, for the backside to look exactly like the front in terms of structure. This enabled us to make the backside into almost a replica of how the front looks without ever compromising on its functional design and logic.  

It resulted into a beautiful family home with a semi-open plan interior design, providing a great environment to entertain guests without disturbing your everyday family life, a rural home they won’t need to take a vacation from.  

And to any individual who haven’t seen the front of the house looking, looking at it from the backside, it’s a pretty good looking traditional home that carries presence. 

It’s one of the few exemplars of home designs that reveals:

“The Far Side of the Moon”