Welcome to our gallery highlighting the playfully extraordinary Jerry House, a contemporary home design by Onion.
Jerry House is the holiday home at Cha Am Beach for a family with four sons. In 2011, they asked Onion to turn their seaside house into the gathering place for the family and friends. The plan was to create a holiday home unlike any typical house. The result is like a playground, where people are encouraged to play in a way that no domestic spaces in nearby Bangkok would enable them to.
Running, climbing, hiding, hanging, and even falling are encouraged, helping vault this home beyond the common lifestyle. For this reason, the designers named the home after “Tom and Jerry” cartoons. The home is expressly meant to be a desirable place for the children, enhancing the appeal of taking holidays at Cha Am Beach for the parents.
A central aspect of the home is the linkage of passageways. The design adds an extra set of vertical circulations at the central hallway to the existing staircases and ramps. The designers used customized nets to build five layers of horizontal planes, in differing slopes, heights, and sizes. These act almost like an extension of floors within this three-story high living hall.
The residents can climb ladders from the ground floor to one of the kids’ bedrooms on the third floor. Jumping down into the holes is a safe way to get back down because of the layers of nets. When looking upward, a mirrored film attached to the ceiling gives the illusion that climbers are floating in the air and that the overlapping layers of net are higher than they actually are.
The bedrooms on the third floor have another type of circulation, a tunnel linking between two sunken sleeping spaces on the walls. To reach the beds, the kids may climb the ladder or walk up the steps inside the bedroom.
Expert color usage is the means to increase visual experience within the home. Onion painted the public areas of Jerry House in white. These include the main living hall, the living room, and the dining room that links the swimming pool to the service quarter on the ground floor.
The bedrooms, on the other hand, are personalized by colors. Mustard yellow is for the primary bedroom and light purple for the guest bedroom. Blue and light green are used for the kids bedrooms.
With the central space full of nets and climbing gear, the soft surfaces make “sleeping in the air” a possibility. The home marries adventure and comfort in an intriguing way.
Here’s the expansive dining room, centered on a massive white table. The social spaces in the home are defined by white walls and full height glazing. The pool area can be seen at left.
Now we get a look at the central climbing space. Here we see the varied sets of ladders and holes connecting the netted levels, with cutouts in the adjacent wall allowing for a look from both sides.
Looking into the vertical space from within the proper upper floor, we see the playful array of arched and curved window openings, as well as an adjacent hallway open entirely to the needed space.
The layers of net are set in varied angles within the vertical space, allowing for adventure-type climbing. The sense of scale is expanded greatly by the mirrored ceiling surface.
Here we see a glimpse of how the home wraps around this central vertical space, with a hallway wrapping around the net and open-plan design allowing the spaces to blend.
This split-level view shows how the normal rules of home architecture simply do not apply within the playful vertical center of this home. A sloped hall wraps one of the angled net “floors,” as we see children occupying levels above and below.
From this central layer, we see the home opened up, with playful windows allowing a glimpse into the bedroom areas.
A vertical view really grants a sense of scale and complexity to the structure. The layers of nets are multiplied by the ceiling mirror at top.
At the very bottom, we see a black carpet for contrast, with an arched doorway leading toward the massive, open plan kitchen and living room area.
Seen from outside, the space appears holistic and singular, standing apart yet within the large home.
Here is one of the color coded tunnels connecting the kids’ bedroom spaces.
Even the standard doorways within the home project a sense of the whimsical, with arched tops and striking colors.
This adult bedroom sports a light purple hue and intricate recessed lighting. The curved theme continues, with a half-arch door and matching full-arch closet.
Here we see the bedroom wrapped in mustard yellow tones, with an array of double-door openings providing a fun and playful way to enter and exit the room.
The room itself features a massive oversized bed dominating the floor space, while the openings throughout allow for natural light and fresh air to flow through, as well as allowing for unique entry and exit.
The bright blue hues in this room contrast with rich natural wood. Here we see the varied-elevation beds set into wall coves, with a tunnel-like hallway between.
The bed cubbies are elevated within the rich hardwood walls, also boasting sets of discreet storage below. Through the arched hall we see the open central area of the home.
We leave you with one last glimpse into the white dominated social space of the home. The intricate curved wall cutouts define the interplay of the structure as much as the central net-filled space.
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(c) 2015
