Reed House / Kamil Taner Architecture & Interiors

Text description provided by the architects. The idea was to create a space of well-being for the mind, body, and soul. A space where the dwellers can live with ease, love, joy, and happiness. A place where they can replenish and rejuvenate away from the energetic life, a place where they feel at home. We spent three months with our clients in order to understand their lifestyles, philosophy, dreams, desires, and motivations. The experience that they wanted to have and the emotions that they wanted to live were paramount to us. The challenge was to identify and understand the feelings of our clients and convert them into a residential house. In architecture, there is an old principle told by Louis Sullivan which is form and function.

Very simply it means the direct relationship between the structure of a thing and its continuation as a function. To us, this principle which is more than 100 years old is not enough anymore. We believe it should be form, function, and feel. Each form and each function brings out a feeling in ourselves. Every building, hotel, restaurant, cafe, car, bicycle, sofa, table, chair, etc… that we see translates into a feeling which tells us if we like or dislike, get excited or bored, are interested or indifferent, and so on and so forth. We believe the majority of our work is bringing out the right feelings.

For the reed house, our core was losing the barrier of inside and outside. We also wanted the fresh air to circulate inside the house. To do those we began designing the house from the inside and continued towards the outside. The amount and size of the windows were a major issue for air circulation. First, we started with the interior space, the size of the bedrooms, living room, dining room, bathrooms, location of windows, and their relationships to each other and to the environment. Each space had to have a clear view of the outdoors and what they will be seeing when they looked outside was equally important.

As we were designing the interior, we also ended up designing the landscape simultaneously to ensure a better viewing experience from inside the house. We designed every little detail such as the kitchen, bathrooms, beds, doors, tables, sofas, coffee tables, wardrobes, fireplace, cabinets, lighting, and all its functions and forms. The last part was designing the form of the house. We needed shade from the sun for outdoor living and to keep the house cool during hot summer days.

We wanted to come up with an exterior design that resembled a soothing sensation which in this case was a blend of Japanese, Balinese, and mid-century architecture. To have big open spaces we used steel structures and wood which also made the construction faster. All these designs are a reflection of our clients and together they bring out the emotions and the experiences they wanted to live in the first place. Reed House is all about balance and harmony.