Dezeen Showroom:Italian wall and floor tile brand Ceramiche Keope has designed a tile collection informed by the veiny appearance of slate.
Named Ubik, the tiles come in eight sizes and five neutral colours called Greige, Ivory, Grey, Walnut and Anthracite.
Ubik tiles are informed by the appearance of slate
Ceramiche Keope describe the collection as a "slate-effect" series, and the tiles can be fitted in either indoor or outdoor settings, making them a versatile option for the home.
The tiles can be paved on walkways, courtyards, or even rooftops that are exposed to harsh weather conditions as well as in living rooms, bathrooms, or other interior spaces.
The tiles can be fitted indoors or outdoors
"Slate is normally used in outdoor settings," said the brand. "However, the ceramic range of different sizes of Ubik has been conceived for sophisticated interior design projects which exalt the expressive force of rough stone."
About Dezeen Showroom: Dezeen Showroom offers an affordable space for brands to launch new products and showcase their designers and projects to Dezeen's huge global audience. For more details email showroom@dezeen.com.
Dezeen Showroom is an example of partnership content on Dezeen. Find out more about partnership content here.
Located on a dyke in the village of Uitdam, the home is called House with a View and was designed for Roijé's own family as a space to "enjoy the landscape as much as possible".
House With a View is a lakeside home designed by Chris Collaris and Frederik Roijé
A large open living, kitchen and dining space sits on the first floor, beneath the exposed pinewood structure of a steeply-pitched roof. Its shape and black-coloured cladding were informed by the houses and barns typical to the Waterland municipality.
This pitched form intersects with a more contemporary rectangular form at its southern end, which extends the living area and creates a covered terrace space projecting outwards towards the lake.
The structure is clad in black-stained timber as a reference to traditional Waterland buildings
"[It is] a house that fits within the contours of the historic buildings, but with unique contemporary features," explained the designers.
"The structure of the house has partly remained visible in the interior... Due to the rectangular element in the house, the living space has areas with straight walls and ceilings...the space is high, and amorphous," they continued.
The roof shape is expressed on the interior of the building's upper level
This large living area is designed to create two different atmospheres at either end of the home. At the front is a more intimate seating area next to a wood-burning stove, with a window looking out at two garden spaces on either side of the street.
At the rear of the home, a more open space is organised around a large kitchen island, overlooking the lake through sliding glass doors.
The dining table sits between these two areas, positioned where the rectangular form intersects with the pitched volume, and is illuminated by a thin skylight.
A pine wood staircase passes a large square window as it leads down to the more private ground floor, where the home's three bedrooms and bathrooms are positioned.
The home was organised around views out to the water
The interiors have been finished using lamps, chairs and tables from Roijé's own collections. Black steel and mahogany window frames reference the exterior colour, and contrast the pale beams of the roof structure and concrete floor.
"To make the atypical typical was the greatest challenge of this house," said Collaris. "[Roijé] has been an inspiration to me for years with his product designs, which in my view are atypical typical as well. They are turning your mind on things you thought you already knew."
A large sheltered balcony projects from the rear of the building
Black timber was used previously by Chris Collaris Architects for its Tiny Holiday Home in a nature reserve near Amsterdam, designed in collaboration with i29 Interior Architects.
The studio has also built a black wooden cottage with an exaggerated roof in Amsterdam.
Kicking off our review of 2021, we round up 10 of the most striking and interesting houses featured on Dezeen this year, including a concrete villa in Indonesia and a mid-century Californian home given a new lease of life.
Encased in ceramic bricks, this house was designed to reflect the pottery heritage of Bat Trang village. Vo Trong Nghia Architects gave the building a perforated exterior wall to naturally cool and ventilate the interior spaces, with small, elevated gardens dotted throughout.
The home won urban house of the year 2021 at the Dezeen Awards, with judges praising its "radical look, the surprising elements and original use of material".
House Tokyo is squeezed onto a tiny plot of just 26 square metres in a densely populated district of the Japanese capital.
Unemori Architects used a stacked box design to help it make the most of the limited space available, with large windows of different orientations meaning the inside is light-filled throughout the day and ceiling heights reaching up to five metres.
Increasingly in 2021, architects have been speaking about the importance of reusing and upgrading existing buildings where possible. Moore House, on a hillside in Los Angeles, is an example of how that can be done to great effect.
The rectangular, single-storey house was built in 1965 but was renovated by local studio Woods + Dangaran, which installed new glazing in the walls and restored the existing wood structure and fascias.
Apart from its industrial aesthetic, what's unusual about this house in Eindhoven is the way it balances outdoor and indoor spaces.
Studioninedots arranged it as a patchwork of alternating courtyards and pavilions, with as much of the living area outside as inside – hence the name, Villa Fifty-Fifty.
This house, designed by Spanish architecture studio Marià Castelló on the Balearic Island of Formentera, is split into three white rectangular volumes.
Each volume contains one of the building's functions: one a sheltered porch, one for cooking, eating and relaxing, and one for sleeping.
The huge concrete roof on this house in the Indonesian city of Bandung is certainly eye-catching. Architecture studio Andramatin designed the house as a reinterpretation of Dutch colonial manor houses.
The overhanging roof is intended to protect the glass-walled main part of the home from heavy rainfall and shield it from direct sunlight.
Austrian studio Firm Architekten built this cuboid house out of materials sourced from within a 50 kilometre radius, including timber from the client's own private forest.
It stands atop a concrete base on a hillside in the Alps, meaning there are panoramic mountain views.
These villas, by Mexican architecture studio Revolution, sit on the Oaxaca coast facing the Pacific Ocean.
They are built from a combination of smooth, reinforced concrete and rough brick, designed to mimic their beachy surroundings and be weather resistant.
Impressed by the villas' balancing of both the radical and the simple, judges at the Dezeen Awards named the project rural house of the year 2021.
Xerolithi is based on the stone retaining walls which are a familiar feature in the Greek countryside, known as xerolithies.
"In a very subtle way, they reveal the presence of man in areas that otherwise seem untouched by civilisation. It only seemed fitting to experiment with this element and to see how it could create shape and space," said George Sinas, founder of Sinas Architects.
The idea was to build a house that merges seamlessly into the sloping topography, in contrast to the white boxes more commonly constructed on the Greek islands.
WT Architecture wanted this house, alongside Loch Tummel in the Scottish Highlands, to enhance its scenic surroundings rather than hide within them.
It emerges from a ruined walled garden, reportedly abandoned unfinished as the builders left to fight in the Jacobite uprising in 1745, to look out over the water.
A retrospective covering more than 400 projects by architecture firm MVRDV is among the events featured in Dezeen Events Guide this month, alongside major design fairs in Miami and Shenzhen.
Other events taking place in December include a CPD webinar on Chris Precht's recently completed modular treehouse Bert and a keynote on art and architecture from Foster + Partners' Spencer de Grey, hosted as part of this year's virtual World Architecture Festival.
Read on for details of five highlights and see Dezeen Events Guide for more architecture and design events around the world.
Upcoming events include exhibitions by MVRDV (top image) and Dior at Design Miami (above)
Following the cancellation of last year's event, Design Miami will once again take over the Miami Beach Convention Centre this December alongside Art Basel, as the city celebrates the return of Miami Art Week.
Now in its 17th year, the collectible design fair is set to exhibit work from more than 220 international galleries, with new furniture collections by Rick Owens and Lebanese designer Khaled El Mays on show alongside a surreal silver bedroom installation by Crosby Studios.
A simultaneous programme of events and exhibitions will be taking place in locations across the city, including the hotly anticipated Miami outpost of gallery Superblue.
The World Architecture Festival is going virtual for the second year in a row, offering what the organisers describe as the "widest access to the largest amount of content in the history of the festival".
Beyond that, the programme features a particular focus on sustainable cities, spanning everything from local food production to the logistics of creating low-carbon high-density infrastructure, with Helsinki's chief design officer Hanna Harris set to discuss how the Finnish capital is planning to become carbon neutral by 2030.
Chris Precht is giving an in-depth lecture on his Bert project for Dezeen
The latest installment in Dezeen's ongoing series of Architecture Project Talks will see Chris Precht share an in-depth lecture about his modular treehouse Bert, built using FSC-certified timber and modelled on the cheeky one-eyed characters from the children's film Minions.
Taking place at 1:00 pm London time on 2 December, the live-streamed talk will see Precht explore the challenges of building a modular cylindrical structure from prefabricated wooden elements, as well as making his case for why architects shouldn't take themselves too seriously.
Those who are interested in attending the webinar, which counts towards continuing professional development (CPD) points for UK architects, should register their interest here.
The organisers of the Design Shanghai fair have this year expanded their offering to Shenzhen, also known as the Silicon Valley of China, with the city's inaugural design fair set to take over the Shenzen Convention & Exhibition Centre with stands from more than 150 local and international and brands.
Dezeen's China editor Christina Yao will be hosting a panel talk to platform some of the emerging Chinese practices that swooped up top prizes at this year's Dezeen Awards.
Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen is among 400 projects included in the MVRDV retrospective
Rotterdam's Het Nieuwe Instituut is showing a major retrospective of work by MVRDV, pulling together hundreds of projects from the firm's archive including the recently opened Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen.
These are represented through drawings, sketches, scale models and renders, arranged in a vast space designed to resemble an architect's studio rather than a traditional museum gallery.
"This exhibition shows how our first 400 projects influenced later work," said MVRDV partner Jan Knikker. "We think it's important that our archive is accessible to everyone. Sharing knowledge makes our profession richer."
About Dezeen Events Guide
Dezeen Events Guide is our guide to the best architecture and design events taking place across the world each year.
The guide is updated weekly and includes virtual events, conferences, trade fairs, major exhibitions and design weeks, as well as up-to-date information about what events have been cancelled or postponed due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
Inclusion in the guide is free for basic listings, with events selected at Dezeen's discretion. Organisers can get enhanced or premium listings for their events, including images, additional text and links, by paying a modest fee.
In addition, events can ensure inclusion by partnering with Dezeen. For more details on inclusion in Dezeen Events Guide and media partnerships with Dezeen, email eventsguide@dezeen.com.
Dezeen has teamed up with the Canadian Centre for Architecture to premiere three short films about Japanese architecture. In the first video, architect Erika Nakagawa shares her vision for a skinny residential tower in Tokyo. Tune in from 3:00pm London time.
The first film, named A Neighbourhood in A House, guides viewers through a scaled model of the conceptual five-storey building designed by Nakagawa.
Proposed for a site hemmed in by tall neighbouring buildings, the structure seeks to demonstrate how small and dense sites in Tokyo can be utilised.
Erika Nakagawa presents a skinny tower proposal in the A Neighbourhood in A House film
The three short films being published this week are part of a series called Models Talk, which was produced by the Canadian Center of Architecture (CCA), a research institution and museum in Montreal.
The series also spotlights recent architecture projects by Japanese architects Kazuko Akamatsu and Kumiko Inui, which each tackle unique urban issues.
They are available to watch in Japanese with English subtitles.
The film was produced by CCA as part of its Models Talk series
Nakagawa's proposal that is showcased in A Neighbourhood in A House is named the Tower and Onomatopoeia. One of the key elements of its design that is highlighted in the film is its main facade, which is composed of a series of staircases.
While providing access and escape routes, the architect imagines these stairs to be occupied by residents and used as "a sequence of gardens" or a roji – a neighbourhood alley in Japan.
"We wanted to let the residents' enjoyment of life manifest itself on the facade," Nakagawa said.
"I wanted to make the stairs work as a kind of garden for the neighbourhood."
Nakagawa's tower design has a facade composed of staircases
Nakagawa graduated from Yokohama National University’s department of construction in 2005, before achieving her masters in Fine Arts and Architectural Design from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2007.
She opened her eponymous studio, Erika Nakagawa Office, in 2014. While practising as an architect, she is a lecturer at Yokohama National University, Hosei University, Shibaura Institute of Technology and Nihon University.
Another key element of the tower's design that is highlighted in the video is its experimental structure, which Nakagawa presents in a series of life-size architectural models.
As it would not be possible to erect scaffolding on the site to construct the building, parts of the tower would be prefabricated and then assembled on-site from the inside.
Nakagawa said that several structural elements are also designed to "participate in the activities of daily life". For example, she imagines exposing H-beams that would usually be hidden so that they can be used as metal shelving in the residences.
The conceptual tower comprises five storeys of residences
The three-part Models Talk series was produced by the CCA in collaboration with architectural curator Kayoko Ota and director Studio Gross, an architectural design firm.
It was created for the CCA c/o Tokyo programme, which is run by the institution with Ota to "develop research and projects, and to facilitate public engagement in Tokyo".
On 8 December, the CCA will be hosting a live conversation at 8:00pm Montreal time to discuss the film series and the urban issues it addresses. CCA's director Giovanna Borasi will be joined by Ota and Studio Gross, as well as all three architects featured in each video.
Attendance is free and registration is open here. To find out more about CCA c/o Tokyo, visit cca.qc.ca/tokyo.
Partnership content
This article was written by Dezeen for CCA as part of a partnership. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.
