Markhouse

place: Kharkiv, Ukraine
function: family house
square: 350 m2
photo: Andriy Avdeenko
team: Oleg Drozdov, Kateryna Yolkina, Serhiy Kostyanyi, Oleksandr Kuznetsov, Vitaliy Pravik

Markhouse is located in the area which has recently become home for a peculiar sort of micro-community made of people united by friendly or family relationships. They have even organized a series of shared places here, such as a lounge-club, a parking lot and paths between the plots.

One of the major challenges was to render habitable the compulsory western exposure of the house to the garden, which is not a favorable location in terms of hot summer weather. Another challenge was to find a compromise between intimacy and collectiveness. The house, in fact, consists of two independent houses with a garage shared by several families. On top of the garage there is also an individual apartment that belongs to one of the relatives.

All daytime functions are united within one single volume of the ground floor, resulting in an unobstructed void created by the courtyard and the strip of glazing beneath the levitating volume of the upper floor with bedrooms. In this way the house is integrated with the garden, while being protected from unfavorable western exposure. The core of the house is a transparent room for work and hobbies, which offers a view over the whole estate, as if from a captain’s bridge.