House on a Hill

The design for the picturesquely sited small manor house is closely related to the project for the Artist’s House, particularly in the composition of the tower and adjacent gable placed within an imagined inner courtyard defined by covered circulation routes, arcades, walls, and ancillary buildings. The scale of a family house is here replaced by that of a manor house; nevertheless, the design retains a domestic character, further emphasized by the deliberately “homelike” treatment of the interior spaces.

The principal organizing elements of the plan are the central fireplace and the staircase, shared by the dining room, the hall, and the living room. Alcoves and niches intended for sitting and reading open off the main spaces. Both the hall and the dining room are double-height spaces with strongly articulated beamed ceilings, and both open directly onto porches and verandas.

The upper floor contains an insufficient number of bedrooms and includes a long corridor leading to a separate “tower room.” This tower room, not directly accessible but reached only via a corridor above the entrance, is explicitly devoid of practical function; instead, it constitutes an intentionally experiential element of the design. Kós employed this motif again in the Artist’s House and at Varjúvár.