As a house on agricultural land, DS Residence was held to a capped building volume. Merckx / Holvoet placed it in farmland beside the village castle in Gestel, Belgium, as far from the street as regulations allowed, for a couple leaving the city after raising three children. The brief asked for a layout without formal conventions, with no separate dining room and no single defined entrance.
Fast build block, insulation, and render make up a deliberately slender facade. That thin build-up allows setbacks and shifts within a single facade plane, and on the inside those offsets hold cupboards, a breakfast nook, storage, and a toilet. On the outside they set a steady rhythm of piers beneath the roofline and let the large windows sit deep in the wall. The windows are framed in solid oak and slide back into the wall itself.
The roof is dark stained pine in vertical boards running from ridge to eaves. Laid in two staggered layers, the boards form their own water grooves. A concealed drainage channel under the gravel along the house replaces any gutter, so rain sheets straight off the roofline. The overhang limits sun exposure and heat gain, and the bedroom terraces are recessed into the roof volume so the pitched silhouette stays unbroken.
Concrete garden walls of varying height and length divide the ground. Three of them enclose the south entrance together with the house. A single long wall to the west screens the pool and terrace from the road, and the pool runs parallel to it, its concrete edge beams continuous with the walls and plinths. To the north and rear there are no walls, only tall grasses planted by the owners.
Volumes in brushed, sandblasted oak frame window openings on three sides of every ground floor living space and absorb the storage and services. Floor and ceiling are both a lime and aggregate mix matched to the facade, so the oak volumes divide the rooms, and sight lines run through the ground floor in a way that carries over the open plan of the couple’s former loft. Heavily sandblasted Belgian bluestone forms the kitchen counter and the freestanding basins in both bathrooms. Metalwork is brushed aluminum and stainless steel throughout, down to the fireplace lining. Upstairs, a night hall with an integrated desk runs through the center of the plan between a guest bedroom and the master bedroom, with no corridors.
