Prim House | STUDIO LOCOMOTIVE

Prim House is an unassuming two-storey home on a hundred-square-meter slice of land, named after the homeowner who ambitiously began her own pet-and-plant-welcome home project in her mid-twenties to put down roots in her pricey hometown Phuket, the fourth most expensive city to live in South East Asia, by not getting into any debt.

Prim House represents a result of the empathic solution design — dealing with the disadvantageous effects of socio-economic shifts turning a homeownership to be a ridiculous dream for the young generations — to redefine and ratiocinate ‘a sufficient home’ of millennial homeowners: practical, manageable, and enjoyable.

Exercising limited financial and spatial resources, the critical design focus commits to this home providing basic necessities: protection, spaces for inhabitation activities, and livability. Self-sustaining and low-maintenance architectural ecosystem, integrating extensive cross openings, vertical air well, and central light passage, economizes home investment and cost-of-living burdens to liberate the millennial homeowner to pursue other life achievements after a willful home project milestone.

Refashioned customary materials and technicalities, such as raw steel products, prefabricated air vents, and exposed structure, were chosen to prevent costly complexity and errors. The provident design thinking towards the sequential construction procedures helped with minimising the labour cost and time consumption from the repetitive transitional tasks. Unlike other similar-looking commercial buildings having poor ventilation and quality of natural light, the open living space makes this tropical home breathable and self-cooling from full-width front openings through extended rows of prefabricated air vents randomly arranged on the rear wall.

Central air well skylight favors vertical ventilation moving cooling air flows and allows daylight to reach most parts of the house including an indoor flora-friendly sunken planting bed without being blocked by a perforated steel stair and overhung bridging grate. The ventilating skylight passage stretches over the bathroom ceiling making this just-upstairs shared bathroom, accommodating the need for both floors, dry quickly and inodorous. Rooms better with privacy walls: two bedrooms and a bathroom, share the second storey and unite to the common space with the view to the flourishing ornamental climbing foliage growing on the exposed structural steel column.

Nonfunctional aesthetics are growing by degrees from the homeowner’s ability to live and fulfill her fascinations with arts, crafts, and plants, blooming in her own gallery, unforced and unhurried.