Fillet House

Kuala Lumpur | Malaysia | Residential

A cityscape with a mix of modern high-rise buildings and residential houses surrounded by green trees, under a cloudy sky.
Modern interior with a black spiral staircase, large windows, white walls, and a polished white floor.

Completed | 2021

Awards | A’Design Award 2021, Italy, Silver

House with Rounded Corners

‘Fillet House’ is a three-story private house consisting of six bedrooms and a dance hall owned by a young couple. The fillet idea was to maximise the corner-lot building plinth through a series of design approaches that responded to the client’s brief and its contexts. Terminology in design, a fillet is a rounded corner or rounded edge. The main four corners of the house are being filleted or rounded as to soften the original allowed cubic mass.  The filleted corner achieved a wholeness and streamlining the building form externally. The building mass was then configured in respond to the tropics, designated programmes and its neighbourhood with subtracted volumes for open terraces and voids.

Modern residential building with black and white exterior, tall narrow windows, and a large sliding glass door at the ground level, with a small grassy area in front.
Close-up of a modern white building with black accents and large windows.
Close-up of a modern building with white and black exterior walls, curved architectural features, and a balcony with a person standing on it, surrounded by green trees.
Interior staircase with a black sculptural balustrade, wooden steps, and large windows revealing trees and buildings outside.

Masses are subtracted from its original to create openness which allowing for day-light penetrations and bring cross ventilation closer to happens within its layout when glazed doors and windows are fully opened. Natural light enters the house across the levels, from open terraces and master lounge at second floor level to the living hall at the ground floor level through a tempered laminated glass floor and void openings at its first-floor level next to the dance hall. Meanwhile, the dance hall, living and dining hall occupying the center of the layout and it connects all other essential spaces in the house. This minimise the need of long corridors by using the halls as the transition spaces between the rooms. 

Diagram showing different building massing options, including maximized plinth, 3-storey building mass, rounded building mass, filled mass, and subtracted and filled mass configurations.
Modern multi-story building with large glass windows, curved balconies, and white exterior walls. A tree partially obscures the top right corner. The building is illuminated from inside, with warm lighting visible through the windows, and the sky in the background appears to be at dusk.
Modern bathroom with black mosaic tile walls and a white freestanding bathtub filled with water. There is a plant in a gray pot on the ledge behind the bathtub, a window above and a magazine on the ledge to the right.
Close-up view of curved wooden slats with black frames, seen from below, forming part of a modern architectural structure.
Architectural section drawing of a multi-story building showing various rooms and spaces with people engaging in activities such as working, exercising, and socializing; includes trees outside and a car parked underground.
Modern white and black multi-story house with curved architectural design, surrounded by a white wall, with black gate and privacy fencing, under a blue sky with clouds.
Interior view of a modern building featuring a black spiral staircase, large windows, white walls, and a series of hanging orange and black pendant lights.
Looking down a spiral wooden staircase with a person walking at the bottom.
Modern interior with a curved staircase featuring wooden steps and a black side panel, in a minimalist white space. A person is ascending the stairs.
Close-up of a modern house exterior with a concrete wall, black metal numbers '12', a tree trunk in front, and a black window with grill on the side.
Modern indoor corridor with wooden wall panels on the left, large glass windows on the right, white ceiling with recessed lighting, and a person walking in the distance.
Modern concrete house number wall with black mailbox and house number 12, next to a pathway, with palm trees in the background.

Round Off

From street level, the staggered ‘filleted mass’ was elevated vigorously from its surrounding.

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