This home office is the residence of a family of four and the workplace for the family’s father. In this project, the most important challenge was the low area and length of the land and the need for various spaces as well as the smallness of the yard.
Project Name: Raha House
Architecture Firm: Ayeneh Office
Website: http://ayenehoffice.com/
Project Location: Najafabad, Isfahan Province, Iran
Lead Architects: Ali Soltani, Atefeh Karbasi, Ali Dehghani
Design Team: Ali Soltani, Atefeh Karbasi, Ali Dehghani, Nooshin Hosseini
Completion Year: 2016
Area: 290 m2
Client: Nayereh Hasankhani, Mr. Mahmoudi
Photo credits: Farshid Nasrabadi (Link to photographer: https://azararch.com/Index.aspx)
In the center of the house, a double-height living room formed. The roof was raised high so that the sky can be seen from the heart of all the public and semi-public house spaces. The basement is the father’s office, which has direct access to the main entrance and the parking space.
Due to the small size of the yard, a part of it went down to the heart of the ground to provide light and freshness for the underground office. Considering the lack of space, the house is designed as a duplex with a monumental staircase that has sewn the upper and lower spaces together. Private spaces and bedrooms are located on the upper floor and public spaces are located on the ground floor.
At the beginning of the entrance, a small yard is predicted for the northern upper floor bedrooms with wooden shaders that have highlighted this yard toward the alley and characterized the façade. A small garden which is located on the roof of the ground floor service spaces provides greenness and nature for the entrance and the alley. Amid the chaos of the alley, the façade tries to show quiet and calm colors and forms.
Ayeneh Office
Since its inception in 2001 by Ali Soltani and Atefeh Karbasi, the Ayeneh Office officially started its architectural activities in 2003. Ali Soltani is an architect who received his Master’s Degree in architecture from Tehran University of Arts. His partner, Atefeh Karbasi is also an architect who was graduated in architecture from Tehran University of Arts. After completing her first Master’s Degree there, she followed her academic career to receive a Master’s Degree in landscape architecture from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Tehran and following that, received her PhD in architecture from Shahid Beheshti University. She has been a member of the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at Shahid Beheshti University since 2011 and published a number of books and articles in the field of architectural design and the history of Iranian architecture. Ayeneh Architecture Office is located in Tehran and has several design and reconstruction projects in different cities. The projects include different uses such as villas or residential complexes, offices, commercial and cultural complexes, and parks in different scales.
Architects of the Ayeneh Office believe that architecture like a mirror should reflect the context or the surrounding environment in the general sense. Context in this regard refers to the setting that a project begins to happen. Architecture welcomes the good way of living in a place and accepts its goodness. In other words, architecture, in one sense, acts as mirror to reflect the life of its context, and broadly speaking, it even reflects many features of the context (such as technology, crafting skills, economics, politics, crafting duration, and culture). The approach and design method in the Ayeneh office is to delve into the heart of both the subject and the place in order to reflect or increase their desirability. We try to excavate the project subject – which is the life that is going to flow in it –as well as its location to find the initial concepts shaping the design, and then epitomize it in our architecture.
Over the past decade, this office has received numerous national and international awards, including several “Memar” awards, and “Architecture and Building” awards in the field of interior design and façade design. For instance, the first rank of the Memar award in the category of residential buildings in 2011, the third rank of the Memar award in the category of public buildings in 2014, the second rank in the category of residential buildings in 2021. The office also obtained the first rank of the interior design award in 2011. Ayeneh office was also nominated for one of the finalists of the 2010 WAF International Competition in Singapore as the only Iranian candidate.
