Renowned British architect John Pawson has designed a simple dwelling for a site formerly occupied by a mews house, located between parallel rows of townhouses in the town of Giessen in central Germany. With an open-plan programme, the house feels light and airy, accentuated by large windows and the neutral colour palette applied throughout.

This project was always going to be about taking a set of established architectural principles and applying them to the creation of an enclosed domestic universe.

At ground floor level, while daily life and lines of sight extrude freely beyond the walls of the house to colonise the entirety of the plot, the atmosphere is purposefully introspective. On the upper floors, the emphasis shifts to elevated vistas and successive recalibration of the dialogue between interior space and the fall of natural light.