Project Onyx

Location
Accra, Ghana
Client
Richard Yentumi
Disciplines
Landscape, Architecture, Interiors
Role
Design modification, 3D design, interiors and landscape
Site area
1,200 m²
Status
Design complete
The house from the road, with a timber-clad upper bay over a covered carport, a slatted gate, and a stone-faced boundary wall lit from below.
From the road

THE SITE

Accra, for the client we built Project Topaz with in 2022. That job also started from drawings somebody else had made. This one started further along than that: the foundations for all three buildings were already in the ground when we were brought in.

A drawing can be argued with. A foundation cannot. Where the three buildings sat on the 1,200 square metres, and how much room was left between them, was settled before we were appointed. Everything on this page happens above that line: the drawings revised, the scheme built in three dimensions, then the interiors and the landscape.

The three buildings are the main house, the outhouse, and a garage carrying a cinema and lounge on its first floor. Richard asked for a high level of design inside and out. On a site where the frame is already set, that is a brief you answer in the blockwork, the rooms and the ground rather than in the massing.

The outhouse dining room seen from the deck: a glazed pavilion under a vaulted white ceiling, with a long table inside and armchairs on the timber boards outside. Inside the dining pavilion: a long timber table under a vaulted ceiling of exposed rafters, with a fully glazed wall opening to the deck and garden.
The dining pavilion, outside · and in

THE SCHEME

The foundations were in and the column positions with them, so the grid and the footprint of each building were not up for discussion. Blockwork is not structure, though, and that is where the changes went: infill walls moved where a room needed to be a different size, and stayed where a column said they had to. Every modification here had to pay for itself inside a frame somebody else set out.

Above that line the job was ours in full. We revised the drawings, built the scheme in three dimensions so the client could see what he was buying, and took the interiors and the landscape as part of the same commission. It is the project on this site where that is easiest to check: the timber on the street elevation, the slatted ceiling in the kitchen and the exposed rafters in the dining pavilion were specified by the same people in the same weeks.

The kitchen, with a slatted timber ceiling over a stone-topped island and a tall wine cabinet set into the run behind it.
The kitchen
The compound from inside the gate: a canopy overhead, the entrance and a glazed garden pavilion beyond, lawn to one side and lavender in raised white planters along the drive.
Inside the gate

WHAT TO NOTICE

Neither roof does what a roof usually does on an elevation. The garage block reads from the road as a clean flat-topped box, and the parapet that gives it that edge is what hides the solar panels on the slab behind it. The main house has no parapet and does not need one: its five skylights sit up on the pitch, out of sight from the ground, pulling daylight into the middle of the plan. Two roofs, one collecting power and the other light, and the street sees neither at work.

The drive passes under the cinema. The timber-clad box over the carport is the cheapest storey on the plot — the foundations and columns holding it up were already there to carry a roof over the cars — and it is the first thing the compound puts over your head.

WHERE THIS STOPS BEING TRUE

None of this is built. Everything above is a claim about drawings, and on this project the drawings sit on a frame we did not set out. If what is in the ground does not match what we were handed — and on a foundation already cast that gets discovered with a tape measure, not a revision — the room sizes we settled move with it.

The two roofs are the parts that need somebody after handover. An unwashed array in Accra can lose between a fifth and a third of its yield across a bad harmattan fortnight, which is why the cleaning interval people keep here from December to February is about two weeks, and the parapet that hides the panels from the street hides them from anyone who might notice they need washing. The skylights carry the opposite risk. Horizontal glazing at five degrees north takes the sun almost square on, so five of them light the middle of the plan for exactly as long as the glass specification that keeps the heat out survives the budget.

Which is the last exposure. The stone on the boundary, the timber ceilings and the joinery are what hold this scheme together, and every one of them is a long-lead item bought in foreign currency. A frame you inherit fixes what the building is; a budget decides whether it is the building in these pictures.