Vernacular Spectacular
Marra + Yeh’s environmentally friendly Stiletto House in Ipoh references local history and culture
In sleepy Ipoh, within a gated community inside a golf course development, lies a house which goes against most expectations of a house found in an upmarket development. Nicknamed Stiletto house by its owners and designed by Australian headquartered firm Marra + Yeh, the house reinterprets the traditional Malay house and is built primarily of local materials with non-traditional construction methods. An exploration of vernacular architecture, the project is a 250 sqm development on a 900 sqm plot of land comprising of a larger main house and a smaller guest house. Surrounded by limestone hills, the main building is deliberately pushed to the edge of the slope, setting up a relationship of refuge within and prospect beyond.
Creating buildings that are tuned to their environments are the speciality of these Sydney-based architects. The practice was founded by Ipoh-born Ken Yeh and Carol Marra, an Argentinian from Buenos Aires, who started it in 2000 in Seattle, Washington, and relocated to Australia in 2005. They were contacted by clients while they were finishing up a nearby project within the same development when the couple who owned the land decided to enquire about their practice after having a look at that home.
VILLAGE VOICE
The couple were retirees and open to ideas so the architects proposed something more out of the ordinary. “We have always wanted to reevaluate the vernacular house in Malaysia, colloquially known as the Malay House but this umbrella term also includes all indigenous housing,” says Marra. “It is a typology that fascinated us as it has evolved over long periods of relative calm stable civilizations and climate and therefore evolved into something very nuanced and sophisticated with its own rituals and traditions. We wanted to see if we could distil these lessons into something using modern techniques and materials.”
Understanding and appreciating the history of the place was used as a reference point and the history of the Kinta Valley,
with its mining and industrial exploits has left behind a legacy of steelwork know-how not necessarily found everywhere. “The material choices have of course a functional aspect as well such as the ability to create large elegant spans in steel and various species of local timbers depending on the application, durability and aesthetic quality. Through a long-standing relationship with a local sawmill, we sourced seven species of local timbers which are used throughout the project,” explains Marra.
Traditional local materials such as brick and concrete were used in unusual ways, using form to eliminate additional structure as in the serpentine street wall, or highlighting the plasticity of concrete in the round openings to the guest house which also allude to traditional Chinese moongates. Construction methods and details bring together cultural, tectonic and technical aspects to create an architecture reflective of Malaysia’s social and historical diversity.
GREEN PIECE
Ecologically sustainable design is fully embedded into Marra + Yeh’s process, so all their projects are rooted in this premise. Over the course of their practice, Marra says that it has become easier to convince clients that environmentally responsible is the natural direction to go, especially as society have become much more enlightened about living in this time of the Anthropocene.
The architects take a twofold approach to sustainability: one is making a high performance building, with quantifiable aspects like energy, water efficiency, and electricity production and therefore deleting air conditioning from living spaces. The other aspect entails making buildings that deliberately push people to a closer connection with nature, tuning the occupants to understand the whereabouts and impact of the sun, the breeze, the shade and creating rituals and patterns of habitation that follow this knowledge.
“Understanding and appreciating the history of the place was used as a reference point”
As the clients are retirees, the architects surmised that they would be spending a significant amount of time on the premises and as such wanted to make the building comfortable no matter what time of the day it was. To facilitate a closer connection with nature, the design orients the building along the east-west axis to minimise sun penetration. The building is pushed up on stilts to taking advantage of higher velocity winds while the shape of the roof creates a single water collection point and maximises exposure for the solar panels whilst also hiding them from view.
Very large overhangs shade the long sides of the building as the sun moves from north to south during the year.
The roof shape pushes the eye outwards towards the sky and the hills, and creates views from the first floor mezzanine. A large deck was created on the north side, bounded by a grove of trees and the building walls were angled outwards. This creates a low pressure zone which helps to draw ventilation through the building.
Stiletto house produces almost three times more energy than it uses and sells the excess back to the grid. The landscaping is watered by collected rainwater and the principal living, dining and kitchen spaces are not air-conditioned. The majority of materials were locally sourced for low embodied energy, including clay bricks and aerated concrete blocks, several species of hardwoods, steel and marble.