Luxury Homes: Mount Sinai property with a striking cage-like facade

TOPOS Architects, together with their clients – a doctor and his wife – designed this stylish, yet unique 3,500 sq ft house. Wanting to break out of the rigidity of modern architectural aesthetics, the team adopted an unconventional solution – to wrap the house with a geometric form by way of a 3D-modelled screen. This also allowed them to preserve the existing structure with minimal extensions, falling in line with the customer's exigency for sustainability.

The screen completely envelops the original front and side facade of the house, cleverly marrying the two forms in a fashionable manner, while providing some shade indoors.

The screen makes for a filter of sorts, limiting the amount of natural light entering the house. The buffer in between the screen and the house also provides some distance from the natural elements, lowering the overall ambient temperature of the interiors, reducing the need for cooling measures and thus energy consumption.

The house was designed with sustainability in mind. Every piece of wood used came only from sustainable forests.

Timeless, yet hardy materials were used – namely timber, granite, aluminium and marble – to achieve an elegant yet evergreen appearance.

TOPOS also adopted an unfussy colour palette, helping the otherwise marked house blend in with the rest of the neighbourhood.