普里姆宅邸

Prim House, designed by Studio Locomotive, is an unassuming two-storey home on a hundred-square-meter slice of land. The house is named after the homeowner who ambitiously began her own debt-free pet-and-plant-welcome home project in her mid-twenties to put down roots in her pricey hometown Phuket.

Exercising limited financial and spatial resources, the critical design focus commits to this home providing basic necessities: protection, spaces for habitation activities, and livability. Self-sustaining and low-maintenance architectural ecosystem, integrating extensive cross openings, vertical air well, and central light passage, economizes home investment and cost-of-living burdens to liberate the millennial homeowner to pursue other life achievements after a willful home project milestone. 

Unlike other similar-looking commercial buildings having poor ventilation and quality of natural light, open living space makes this tropical home breathable and self-cooling from full-width front openings through extended rows of prefabricated air vents randomly arranged on the rear wall. Central air well skylight favors vertical ventilation moving cooling air flows and allows daylight to reach most parts of the house including an indoor flora-friendly sunken planting bed without being blocked by a perforated steel stair and overhung bridging grate. 

The ventilating skylight passage stretches over the bathroom ceiling making this just-upstairs shared bathroom, accommodating the need for both floors, dry quickly and in-odorous. Rooms better with privacy walls: two bedrooms and a bathroom, share the second storey and unite to the common space with the view to the flourishing ornamental climbing foliage growing on the exposed structural steel column.

On the execution, the provident design thinking output enabled the sequential construction planning that minimized labor cost and time consumption from repetitive transitional tasks. Refashioned customary construction materials and technicalities, such as raw steel products, prefabricated air vents, polished concrete, and exposed structure were chosen to prevent costly complexity and errors.