Trim House

It begins with an invitation. In 2016, a private client invited several international studios to a closed competition for a single-family house in a suburb of Vilnius. The area is shaped by loose, traditional development: houses and summer cottages set among trees, surrounded by expansive grounds. The plot once held wooden houses from the interwar period, though nothing of them remains. Into this quiet, forested landscape, a new home was to be placed.

The design by Robert Konieczny and KWK Promes takes this setting seriously. Part of the house is raised by one level, creating a patio beneath it. This courtyard draws additional daylight into the interior and joins the living area to form an extension of the garden. The raised upper floor holds the private night zone. The bedrooms open onto a terrace above the ground floor, allowing the residents to experience nature without surrendering their privacy or sense of security.

Then everything changed. In 2017, still during the design process and before the studio could even give the concept a name, a new government came to power in Lithuania and introduced regulations that halved the permissible building footprint. The driveway was also relocated and now led directly into the garden. What appeared to be a constraint became the turning point of the project.

The client began to search for a new site. Yet the architects persuaded him to remain on the original plot and instead reduce the floor area by forty per cent. From this reduction, a triangular plan emerged. The enlarged garden and the improved access to sunlight, especially precious in this northern setting among the trees, became the arguments that pared the house down to its clear form. The scale changed, yet the core idea remained untouched.

It is precisely at this threshold between inside and out that Sky-Frame comes into play. The flush sliding elements dissolve the wall to the garden and let living space and landscape flow into one another. Where there was once a boundary, only light, glass and the view into the forest remain. Trim House shows that constraint can become clarity, and that a house feels most expansive when it is reduced to the essential.