The magnificent Prince Emil Garden sits right outside the building's entrance. Here, amid towering existing trees from an adjacent schoolyard and private gardens, FFM Architects Tovar + Tovar created a striking multi-family residence—one that evokes the grace of a modern villa nestled in parkland. The façades exemplify this vision: refined yet restrained, they layer smooth felt plaster against vertically hand-brushed plaster grooved to a depth of up to 20 millimetres. These surfaces engage beautifully with the mature trees and reinforce the organic flow of the landscape. Yet the design's true magic lies in how daylight orchestrates a constantly shifting relief across the façade, lending the building a sculptural, refined quality. Rather than relying on pigment, the architects allowed light and shadow to compose the surface's character throughout the day, creating a living, breathing exterior.

The client sought high-quality one-and-a-half to three-room apartments flooded with natural light for rental. This presented a genuine design challenge—and an opportunity for inventive solutions. The elegant building occupies an exceptionally narrow, deep lot in the garden and courtyard area, with the schoolyard's historic structures defining the eastern boundary. To maximize daylight for every unit, the architects arranged apartments around a central staircase core. The western and corner units feature shallow plans with extensive glazing, while the eastern wall—a blank fire wall—required creative thinking. Here, the architects introduced deep "loft apartments" with fully glazed north and south facades. Open-plan layouts place a partially glazed kitchen and bathroom core at the centre, while upper floors gain additional light through skylights that illuminate the core zone.

Faced with demanding lighting constraints, the design employs polished light Jura natural stone flooring, a horizontal steel railing with oak handrail, and carefully proportioned wooden entrance doors to establish a warm, luminous atmosphere. A generous stairwell opening floods the staircase with daylight—enhanced by thoughtfully positioned surface-mounted fixtures that brighten the hallway walls.

www.ffm-architekten.de

Photography Credits:

FFM Architects. Markus Raupach
FFM Architects. Hendrik Tovar

(Featured in CUBE Frankfurt 04|23)