SR House is a minimalist residence located in Tabanan, Indonesia, designed by Nicolas Schuybroek Architects. The six-year span between design and completion mirrors the project’s own logic: a house built through listening. Resting on gently sloping land in northwest Bali – between a river bend, paddy fields, jungle, and coastline – SR House was commissioned by a Jakarta-based couple seeking a second home grounded in the island’s particular genius loci. Nicolas Schuybroek, whose Brussels practice moves fluidly between interiors and architecture, approached the site by first placing wooden platforms at proposed block positions to verify sightlines and heights before a single form was committed to concrete.
That material choice is the project’s central provocation. Balinese vernacular architecture – connected pavilions, high-pitched roofs, bamboo, thatch – reads through timber and texture. SR House answers with monolithic cast concrete, a deliberate alignment with the sculptural tropical modernism of Brazil and Indonesia in the 1960s and 70s, and the landscape-framing sensibility of Andra Matin. The concrete here is not polished into submission. Slabs were cast in timber formwork and sand-blasted by hand, leaving the artisan’s mark legible in the surface – a direct rebuttal of the flawless, meditative finish associated with Tadao Ando. The texture keeps company instead with the lava stone terrace slabs, rough-edged and local.
Departing from the open, dissolving thresholds typical of tropical modernism, Schuybroek pulls the interior inward. The house shelters against humidity, wind, and sun; nature enters through framed apertures rather than freely through open walls. The four concrete blocks are organized around distinct viewpoints – bedrooms face the paddy fields, living spaces open to a panoramic sweep of coastline, bathrooms receive light through skylights that turn concrete, water, and shadow into the primary sensory material.
