Light House: A Skinny Amsterdam Home of Glass Blocks

Studioninedots has completed Light House, a tall and narrow family home in Centrumeiland, Amsterdam, shaped around light, privacy, and everyday connection. Designed as a vertical stack of rooms, the house responds to a compact urban plot with a playful arrangement of volumes, voids, glass blocks, and terraces.

A Vertical Home for Different Ways of Living

Instead of treating the house as a conventional floor-by-floor layout, Studioninedots organized Light House as a series of stacked spaces. Each level supports a different rhythm of family life, from gathering and cooking to retreating, relaxing, and looking outward across the new neighborhood.

The concept is based on “living apart and together,” allowing each family member to find privacy while still remaining visually and spatially connected. In a house this slim, that is not a decorative idea; it is basically survival architecture with better materials.

Glass Blocks, Voids, and Filtered Light

The defining feature of Light House is its use of glass blocks, which wrap parts of the facade and internal voids. These translucent surfaces soften daylight, create privacy, and give the compact interior a sense of depth beyond its actual footprint.

At ground level, the entrance opens into a double-height living, dining, and kitchen space organized around a tree. The room connects directly to the garden through sliding glass doors, creating a bright axis from the street-facing facade to the rear outdoor area.

Industrial Outside, Warm Inside

Light House balances an industrial exterior with a more intimate interior atmosphere. Outside, glass bricks, metal grilles, and metal cladding give the home a robust urban character, suitable for Centrumeiland’s experimental self-build context.

Inside, white surfaces emphasize the geometric composition of the stacked volumes, while timber doors and a glossy deep-red tiled kitchen island bring warmth and tactility. The contrast feels deliberate: cool and precise from the street, softer and more personal once inside.

Stairs, Terraces, and the 15-Metre Section

A long wooden stair connects the lower three levels, before meeting a deep-red metal spiral staircase that rises to the upper floors. This circulation system turns movement through the house into part of the spatial experience, not just a way to reach the next room.

The top floor contains a secondary living area framed by large arched windows and connected to a terrace. Here, the narrow house opens up again, ending its 15-metre-high section with light, air, and views rather than a cramped attic pretending to be useful.

With Light House, Studioninedots turns a constrained Amsterdam plot into a layered family home where compactness becomes an opportunity for connection. The project shows how vertical living can feel generous when light, voids, and carefully placed volumes are allowed to do the heavy lifting.