Actually, everything was already there - the brick house from the 1930s, built in the Lower Rhine style with a pitched roof and whitewashed façade, garage to garage with an identical house in a housing estate in Meerbusch. However, renovation and additions were required: Not only were there the usual structural defects in the basic structure - the walls and windows were barely insulated and the rafters were partially dilapidated - but the number of rooms was no longer perfectly tailored to the needs of the owner's family of four. An earlier extension had provided the house with a conservatory on the garden side, but this was also full of thermal bridges and cold bridges and allowed very little daylight into the interior.

Patrick Müller-Langguth's Düsseldorf architectural firm beige.box was commissioned to develop a conversion that sensitively extends the house without altering its cherished period design. The conservatory was completely dismantled and replaced by a single-storey extension that houses the spacious living room with a view of the garden. Two skylights, whose reveals were completely mirrored, ensure that not only daylight but also the sky enters the living and dining area. This also created - almost automatically - a roof terrace with a view of the garden. Another eye-catching feature in the kitchen is a strip of windows set into the brickwork, into which the kitchen counter extends without a backsplash. In order to create a separate parents' floor with a bathroom and dressing room, the attic, now insulated for the first time, was converted, lit by larger skylights and accessed by a new, sculptural steel and glass staircase as an extension of the main staircase. Otherwise, care was taken to ensure that only a few authentic materials were used. The stucco profiles on the extended roof overhangs have been faithfully restored and the old sash bar windows have been replaced with matt lacquered wood-aluminum construction. The newly insulated brickwork is clad with various thicknesses of sanded clinker brick slips, cleverly creating the structural irregularities of the former brick façade. So it is more than a compliment to say that even after the conversion, the house still looks like its structurally identical neighbor.

www.beigebox.de

(Published in CUBE Düsseldorf 01|20)