Zaffir

Our first project began with a house that carried incredible presence even in its worn state. The structure was originally a farm, used to house animals. There was no running water or electricity and the rooms were all disconnected from each other.  The mill room, with its soaring arches, was the heart of the building. They were beautiful but fragile - some of the flat arches were failing, and the ‘xorok’ they carried would eventually need to be secured by an entirely new structural system. Even so, standing in that room for the first time, what struck me was its scale and rhythm. It was a space that demanded respect.  From above, the courtyard revealed the proportions of the house – a geometry that was generous yet underused, waiting to be reconnected to the life inside.  What would become the kitchen was long and narrow, not altered by insensitive interventions but still far removed from the potential of the house. It hinted at the way people had once lived here, but not at how the building might serve contemporary life.  What we saw at Zaffir was a building with strong bones: a house where the past still spoke clearly, even through its fragility. That first encounter shaped the approach that would define the project; not to erase what was there, but to let those bones guide every new intervention.

The original volumes were a cellar, with a very awkward connection to the courtyard. A long narrow room with beautiful arches that would eventually become the kitchen and dining room with a reading nook at the far end. The original exterior staircase linked the courtyard to the roof of the mill room, another long narrow room on top of the kitchen, an intermediate room and eventually, with a ladder, the roof of the mill room.  Underneath the intermediate room there was a toilet, the only item connected to the main sewage system. It didn’t have running water, they would have washed their hands from the well. Then there was the mill room with its beautiful high arches and a triangular courtyard at the back of the mill room. Inaccessible except through a narrow opening. There was also another room off the courtyard that had very few windows that had very high ceilings. The roof of the mill room and that of the volume at the front of the property were disconnected from the existing structures and somehow needed to be connected.

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