Pocket House Residential | Winner Designs
Pocket House Residential  by Cristina Menezes

Pocket House Residential

Golden A' Design Award Winner 2016

Pocket House Residential by Cristina Menezes represents a compelling contribution to contemporary residential design discourse, embodying principles of material economy, spatial transparency, and harmonious landscape integration that have distinguished progressive domestic architecture since the mid-twentieth century modernist tradition. The work appears to engage thoughtfully with questions of adaptive reuse, transforming what suggests industrial steel framing into an elegant dwelling that celebrates rather than conceals its structural logic. One observes in this composition a sophisticated understanding of the pavilion typology, where the boundary between interior sanctuary and exterior garden dissolves through extensive glazing that renders the living spaces simultaneously sheltered and exposed to their verdant surroundings. The designer demonstrates particular sensitivity to chromatic relationships, selecting a cool blue-gray for structural elements that achieves complementary dialogue with the warm timber surfaces visible within, this material palette suggesting both industrial heritage and organic warmth. The rooftop terrace expands usable living area while maintaining visual lightness through transparent glass balustrades that preserve sight lines to the mature tree canopy above. Landscape architecture appears conceived as integral rather than incidental to the architectural proposition, with carefully composed ornamental grass plantings, established tropical specimens, and a meandering brick pathway creating processional approach that rewards the visitor with gradual revelation of the dwelling. The photograph captures the residence at blue hour, that liminal moment between day and night when artificial illumination transforms architecture into luminous sculpture, the warm amber glow emanating from within creating an inviting beacon against the cooling twilight sky. What questions might this work raise about contemporary dwelling, about the relationship between industrial vocabulary and domestic intimacy, about transparency and privacy, about buildings that serve as frames for nature rather than barriers against it?

The project is a house inside a naval container with the use of the solar energy; dry construction generating less waste; thermo-acoustic treatment to do not use air conditioner; coatings and furniture made with recyclable materials. All of them based at the sustainability principles. The greatest challenge of this project was the respect with the small space! The total domain of the spatial proportions was crucial to meet the client's program: a bedroom; a bathroom; living with a dining room and a kitchen! All the furniture was carefully studied and designed to meet this concept!