Fillet House

Kuala Lumpur | Malaysia | Residential

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.

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. 

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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