Customer-made: A home design to suit all tastes

Customer-made: A home design to suit all tastes

Maria Endah Hulupi, Contributor, Jakarta

The customer is always right, right?

True, but translating a home owner's wishes without breaking a set of design principles can be a tough task. Architect Ahmad Djuhara succeeded nevertheless in creating a clean-cut, modern three-story house in a housing complex in North Jakarta.

It fully conforms to the wishes of the young couple with children for a home that reflected their taste, lifestyle as well as meeting their growing family's needs -- boasting a modern atmosphere with a stimulating space experience, colors as well as "interesting" displays of materials -- while staying true to Djuhara's own design objectives.

Djuhara said he was influenced by the works of several foreign and local architects in making design solutions.

"I think it's part of the learning process," said the winner of the Association of Indonesian Architects' competition to develop the Wayang Museum in Kota, West Jakarta.

The house stands on a plot of land that was raised about 70 centimeters higher than the street level.

"The plot was elevated because the lower floor, which was initially a semibasement, also accommodates the servant's quarters and according to feng shui, a living quarter should not be lower than the street level," Djuhara explained, referring to the Chinese architectural principles.

To provide balance for its elevated appearance, the architect designed a front staircase with a rich-toned wooden shield made of bars and arranged horizontally. The front staircase is also the main entrance to the house's ground floor.

Individual spaces in the interior were created with an aim to stimulatingly the surrounding area through the use of different heights, and a winding corridor connecting one room to another gives an extensive impression to the house.

One of the architect's ambitions was to provide all rooms with natural light during the day and good air circulation.

The ground floor accommodates a dining room, a living room, a kitchen and a guest bedroom. The living room is reduced to a functional seating area with plenty of space sensation.

"In my opinion, a living room slowly loses its importance but it is included because the owners, though knowing that they would not receive guests every day, insisted on having it."

The staircase leading to the upper floor, Djuhara said, was designed to balance the floor to floor height. As a result, the staircase speaks of grandness, which the owners wished to express in that area.

The house owners worked closely with him in choosing and buying the materials and furniture for the home.

The upper floor is a private area and colors are the predominant features here. The area is uniquely designed to represent character of each family member through the selection of colors, seen in the master bedroom, children's bedrooms and the playroom, which could also be converted to another children's room in the future.

"I use different colors, and each represents a member of the family. For me, this is important because the children are also my clients and I want to respect their individuality by making sure that their existence is present in every path they take inside the house," said Djuhara.

The children was asked to individually pick their own colors from his color chart.

There is a wall in the corridor which was transformed into a gallery where drawings created by the owners' eldest child are displayed. A section of the wall near the staircase is painted blue, representing the parents' choice of color.

The master bedroom was created with a straightforward, modern interior. Parquet flooring is used because it is elegant and comfortable for the skin and it is arranged into a zipper-like motif. The room has five clean-cut door panels, linking it to the bathroom and a walk-in-closet.

The modern house is also adorned with a tropical garden with frangipani and bamboo among the dominant plants. A small bed in the exterior is allocated for yellow bamboo trees, offering a pleasing contrast to the deep brown wooden screen that cases the entrance.

"To Chinese people, a bamboo tree helps protect the house and those living in it against bad luck," the architect said.