Bracket Design Studio — Shervin Hosseini

The Abbas Abad neighbourhood is among the oldest quarters of Isfahan, long the residence of wealthy families; today the large houses and gardens are gone, mostly subdivided and converted — according to size and area — into apartments large and small, each trying to outdo the next in catching the eye. A process that has continued over the past fifty years, with each era's style and taste and successive changes in urban regulations, has produced a ring of buildings sitting beside one another in different styles and colours. Amid this crowd of multicoloured apartments, large detached houses on small plots like this one are rarely to be found.

Securing maximum light and view while observing the mandatory privacy setbacks, and ultimately respecting the introvert character the client sought, has — despite the smallness of the plot — driven the building toward its final form and the materials chosen.

Part of the natural light required for the project's spaces is provided by the mandatory regulatory setbacks on the second storey; the rest is delivered by the negative spaces formed as voids on the west and north sides.

This small plot — roughly 100 square metres — sat at the limit of what the urban regulations of Isfahan allow to be built as a single-family house. The architectural challenge was to weave together the client's brief, the introversion brief, the mandatory privacy setbacks and the neighbours' modern-yet-different design vocabularies. Picking a colour palette derived from Isfahan's old fabric — combined with a contemporary timber-louver detail — let the house sit confidently and yet quietly among the surrounding colour-clamour.