MAISON IMHO
Direct comission 2023
Completition 2025
Private client
Riehen, Switzerland
Team: Marco Zürn, Markus Stern, Silvana Feuring, Emmanuel Kazis
In collaboration with wh-p Ingenieure Basel, Studio Emma Thomas, Lehmag, Georg Paul Lehmbau, Lehmwerk, Schreinerei Hugenschmidt, Huber Straub
Photography: Markus Stern
Located on a hillside in Riehen, overlooking the city of Basel, this family home for a couple and their two children applies a clear, industrial logic to the domestic scale.
The architecture draws from Le Corbusier’s Dom-Ino model—a stripped-down concrete frame that prioritises structure, repetition and longevity. Implementing flexibility not for its own sake, but for clarity and purpose in construction. Within this rational framework, we introduce a language of material warmth and locality. The non-load-bearing interior walls are formed from clay excavated directly from the building site. An ancient material re-contextualised within modernist geometry. The contrast between the cool precision of concrete and the haptic presence of clay creates a spatial tension that is both calm and rich.
The home presents two distinct faces: toward the slope and city, a fully glazed façade maximises light and view; toward the rising hill, a painted timber façade signals privacy and continuity with local building traditions.
Our goal is to bring architecture back to essential, enduring values: structure, climate, craft, and place. This project proposes a house that is at once industrial and intimate—merging architectural discipline with a sense of refined comfort befitting its context. A prototype for building with rigor, restraint, and regional depth.
The project is structured around three concrete slabs, each cast in place and supported by a combination of columns and retaining elements. In between the slabs a distinct program is hosted: sleeping, living with work/play zones and utilities below.
The design is intentionally minimal and meticulously detailed. A concrete skeleton gives form to the house and defines its logic. While materially is restrained, the architecture is carefully composed to achieve a high degree of spatial quality and physical comfort. No superfluous elements are introduced; detailing is direct, junctions are legible, and every element has structural or spatial necessity, elevated through precision.
The interior is defined by massive clay walls—bricks are molded from the site’s own earth—offering tactile comfort, acoustic softness, and thermal stability. These walls are not ornamental but elemental: breathing, bearing, aging. They perform: regulating indoor climate, storing warmth, and minimising artificial intervention.
The plan is organised to support daily life with calm efficiency: utility and workspace below, shared space in the middle, and rest above. Circulation is linear but never monotonous, unfolding with light and view. Architecture here is seen as structure, material, and experience. Everything else is left out.
In some years, the house can easily be adapted to a double house, adding an exterior stair and a kitchen on the first floor. The wood walls at entrance can be dismantled and modified.
