When KWK Promes was invited to submit a concept for a house in Vilnius, Lithuania, the parameters might have sounded like an architect’s dream: Here was a private client selecting a firm via competition to envision a home on a generous suburban footprint.
“This is an area characterized by loose, traditional development, with houses and summer cottages nestled among trees and expansive recreational grounds,” the firm explains. “On the plot included in the competition, as well as in its surroundings, there were once wooden houses from the interwar period, which have not survived to the present day.”
Based in Katowice, Poland, and led by Robert Konieczny, KWK Promes is an innovative firm known internationally for its bold residential and cultural projects. So it comes as no surprise that it was chosen to design the house in Vilnius.
Its idea was simple: By raising part of the house one level up, the patio space is doubled, ushering daylight deep into the spaces within. The living area, with its communal spaces, would be on the ground level and the bedrooms above. A simple, yet effective, plan.
Then, in 2017, the site was halved just before the architects could begin the build: The Lithuanian Farmers and Greens Union came to power and reduced the allowable building footprint by 50 percent. Instead of bailing — and following the client’s instinct to start looking for a new site — KWK Promes convinced the owner to stay and reduce the home’s surface area by 40 percent. “As a result, a triangular floor plan emerged.”
While most architects will tell you that they need constraints in order to conceptualize, this was going above and beyond. The firm effectively sliced the home in half — its diagram shows how the final form emerged — and made it better. The tighter geometries created dynamic, idiosyncratic conditions in a house that now measures 3,230 square feet.
Instead of a double patio, the house now wraps its two levels around an interior courtyard. The building is a composition of concrete and glass, its sharp angles — the most dramatic being a flat-iron elevation — complemented by the curved curtain wall of the atrial volume. The interior (by Yes. Design Architecture) features a sculptural spiral staircase as a focal point against minimal furnishings and neutral finishes — save for the ostentatiously veined marble of the kitchen island.
Completed in 2025, Trim House shows how innovative thinking can overcome the steepest obstacles and that smaller is sometimes better.
To see this and other works by the firm, visit kwkpromes.pl.
Photos by Jakub Certowicz and Juliusz Sokołowski.
