Designing ARQ10 — a three-year conversation with IDIN and T.R.O.P.

We started the ARQ10 brief with a single line: make us a house we would want to live in ourselves.

That was it. No floor-plan template. No pre-set square-metre count. Nine months of sketches and arguments later, we had the L-House — six storeys, 615 sqm, one shared idea that every room would sit inside a courtyard.

Three decisions shaped everything.

One — the basement. We built a hidden basement before we knew what it would be used for. Our earliest buyers have turned them into a wine cellar, a cigar lounge, and a home cinema. Each was exactly what they needed. None of them would have asked for it in a brief.

Two — the slow bar. At our first construction site meeting, IDIN's founder said "every living room should have a slow bar" — meaning a countertop at drinking height, somewhere between kitchen and lounge, where you can stand with one drink and no phone. It is in every L-House.

Three — the rooftop as landscape. T.R.O.P. designed the rooftops as gardens, not terraces. There is soil. There are trees. From the 6th floor you see the airport, and between you and the airport there are twenty years of canopy.

At ARQ10 the point was never "big." The point was considered.