In the house Peeters the living room is double-height. Downstairs it is connected with the dining corner through a passage, and upstairs with a balustrade with the study, accessible with a visible staircase (see photos interior). This blog is about such spatial solutions, usually called duplexes, which have a different function downstairs and upstairs. We do not discuss here the one-and-a-half-height rooms, such as the living room of the Villa Müller by Loos, the duplexes that upstairs only connect to a landing, such as the sitting area of the Villa Cavrois by Mallet-Stevens, and the solutions with a staircase in the living room, very common in the Arts and Crafts.
Already in the Middle Ages, high rooms lent themselves to duplexes. In the Great Hall of Penshurst Place from 1341, the Minstrel’s Gallery was built in the 16th century with underneath, partially spatially separated from the hall, a passageway.
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The insertion chamber in the house Bonck in Hoorn from 1624 has a completely different character. The surface area of the lower level has been preserved and above, the space has been reduced by a room that is suspended from the wooden ceiling beams.
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From 1920 onwards, Le Corbusier was the champion of duplexes, which lent themselves perfectly to the channg views during the promenade architecturale. In the first part of the book œuvre complète he writes, next to the plans of the first version of la maison Citrohan:
‘Nous mangions dans un petit restaurant de cochers, du centre de Paris; il y a le bar (le zinc), la cuisine au fond; une soupente coupe en deux la hauteur du local; le devanture ouvre sur la rue.’
The café-restaurant was Le Mauroy in the rue Godot-de-Maury 32, opposite the house where Ozenfant lived. The restaurant existed until the late 1970s and Charles Jencks printed in his book on Le Corbusier an interior photo of it.
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On a perspective sketch in Vers une architecture we see the most common solution for a duplex in a house: in the high part is the sitting area and in the low part, in the same space, is the dining area, with above it a boudoir that gives access to the bedroom.
Le Corbusier was able to realise the duplex for the first time in 1923 in the house for La Roche. The space of three storeys high is a hall, with stairs, a footbridge and ancillary rooms such as a library, and was mainly intended to impress the visitor and to show him the owner’s painting collection.
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The duplex in the pavillon de l’esprit nouveau at the world exhibition of Paris in 1925 made an impression on many visitors, among them the 17-year-old Gaston Eysselinck. Although it was intended as an example of a duplex flat in a housing block, it could also be read as a house. Characteristic for Le Corbusier was the window that spanned the full height of two storeys and the full width of the room.
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Le Corbusier used a similar solution for one of the two houses at the Weissenhof exhibition in Stuttgart of 1927, on which Eysselinck based himself for the house Peeters.
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Paul-Amaury also used such a plan for his own house in Brussels in 1935. He also took over the double-height window. The short distance between the balustrade of the library and the window and the clearly present displaced staircase in the middle of the house leads to a different spatial and functional effect than in the two houses mentioned earlier.
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In the house Cook from 1926, Le Corbusier developed the smaller spaces of the dining area downstairs and the study upstairs not in the longitudinal direction of the sitting area but next to it.
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A corner of the music room in a house in Brno from 1928 by architect Bohuslav Fuchs is worked out on the ground floor with a sitting area and a dining area and on the upper floor with a library and a landing.
A similar solution, reduced to the essence, we find in the house for the painter Lenglet by Louis Herman De Koninck from 1926: above an L-shaped space of three squares with studio and library and below a single square with living room.
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