Conversion of a workers' house
Samir Alaoui Architects

Samir Alaoui completed the conversion of a workers’ villa from the 1940s.

The house belongs to a protected complex of identical houses originally built for the national railway company’s workers.

The house had originally one inhabitable floor, a lower level, consisting of a cellar and a garage and one access from the outside.



The new intervention creates a bedroom and a studio on the lower level, and a new entrance space to reorganize the vertical circulation and give access to the two levels.

To achieve the necessary height for the creation of the living spaces, the floor of the lower level had to be excavated. Equally, multiple windows were added or otherwise enlarged.

The new height difference, gained both in the bedroom and studio, is marked by a finish of sand-wash concrete, as well as the new floors and the entrance.

This use of peculiar finishing retains the trace of the original level and differentiates the new intervention.

In contrast to the concrete the entrance space was made out of wood frames. 



The new level separation, between the existing ground floor and the newly added lower floor, is marked on the original facade and on the burnt wood extension.

The difference is highlighted through a pale bordeaux colored socle and symmetrically an offset of the lower timber fins in the exterior volume.

The conversion of the workers’ villa plays with subtle materialities, the dichotomy between the contextual and the contemporary. 



A project by Samir Alaoui Architects
Location Lausanne, CH
Year 2018 - 2021
Program Private House+Atelier
Photography © Tonatiuh Ambrosetti
Three Pavilions, Place du Marché Aigle Encounter Iced Sound PUZZLE GREENHOUSE Locanda Case Vecie Inside Outside Room

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