Project Name: Light House

Location: Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Architecture Practice: Studioninedots

Total Floor Area: 257 m²

Completion: 2025

Photography: Sebastian van Damme

Design Features: Amsterdam-based practice Studioninedots has completed Light House, a boldly conceived family residence on Centrumeiland, the city's ambitious new neighbourhood built on a culture of self-build experimentation and sustainability. Conceived as a vertical landscape of stacked boxes, the 257-square-metre home dismantles the conventional logic of domestic living.

Rather than clustering programme on the ground floor, the architects elevated each key activity — dining, gathering, solitary retreat — into its own distinct volume, composing these boxes in a configuration that is simultaneously playful and rigorously considered. The result is a home where the boundaries between above and below, inside and outside, open and enclosed, dissolve entirely. Light moves through the house as both material and medium. The lower half of the building is wrapped in a grid of square glass blocks, filtering daylight deep into the interior while rendering the life within as an abstract, shifting silhouette visible from the street. This square rhythm extends across the rear facade through steel grating elements, lending the house a cohesive industrial identity that shifts in character as daylight changes throughout the day.

At its heart, a sheltered floating volume above the kitchen offers quiet refuge for reading or yoga. At its crown, a 14-metre-high gathering room with arched ceiling-height windows opens onto a terrace commanding panoramic views across the IJmeer lake, a private rooftop retreat the architects describe as a holiday home. Structurally, Light House is as considered as it is expressive. A lightweight steel frame infilled with prefabricated timber elements enables flexibility, circularity, and long-term adaptability as the family evolves. Designed to grow alongside its inhabitants, this is a house that defies typology and delivers something far more powerful: a home that feels entirely, unmistakably theirs.

Design Team: Founded in Amsterdam in 2011, Studioninedots has established itself as a distinctive voice in contemporary architecture and urban design. Led by founding partners Albert Herder, Vincent van der Klei, and Metin van Zijl, alongside associates Ike Gronheid, Jurjen van der Horst, Stijn de Jongh, and Wouter Hermanns, the 25-strong multidisciplinary practice operates across architecture, interior design, and urban planning.

At the core of the firm's design philosophy is a rigorous pursuit of spatial quality rooted in human experience. Studioninedots approaches each commission by distilling its programmatic and contextual essence, translating complex briefs into architecturally precise interventions that challenge typological convention. The practice is particularly adept at navigating intricate urban conditions, specialising in the reactivation and transformation of dense, layered city environments where unconventional spatial strategies yield the most meaningful outcomes.

Central to their methodology is a commitment to circularity, material craftsmanship, and the productive potential of experimentation. Rather than imposing predetermined form, the studio cultivates conditions in which architecture can generate unexpected spatial qualities and foster new modes of collective inhabitation. From residential commissions to civic and urban-scale projects, Studioninedots consistently delivers work that is formally inventive, contextually grounded, and deeply attuned to the social fabric of the built environment.