3-in-1 Functionality: A Compact Home Stacking Three Generations Near the Black Sea

How do you fit six people from three generations into a single tight urban plot and still give each of them room to breathe? Stefania Bulanga answers with a house that reads as a minimalist box from the street but operates, inside, as a richly choreographed vertical landscape. Every floor belongs to a different generation, every corridor pulls double duty, and a pair of skylights stitch the whole thing together with a continuous column of daylight.

Sited on a narrow plot near the Black Sea and hemmed in by dense urban fabric, 3-in-1 Functionality houses grandparents, two parents, and two young daughters across four floors. The ground level anchors the family around a shared kitchen, dining area, and greenery-tended living space. The middle levels accommodate the grandparents and parents respectively, and the top floor, flooded with light, is given entirely to the children: a combined playground and home cinema. It is a compact residential project that refuses to treat compactness as a constraint.

A Narrow Facade That Conceals Vertical Complexity

From the street, the house presents a slender face: yellow accent panels and geometric glazing give it a restrained graphic identity, almost modest in scale. A translucent FRP front facade ensures that passersby see form rather than interior life, granting the family privacy while letting softened light filter inward. Step inside, however, and the spatial logic reveals itself. Looking up through the angular glazed roof structure, you register the full four-storey void that organizes the house. Concrete walls, metal railings, and the geometry of the stairwell make it clear that this is not a standard stacked apartment; it is a single organism with a legible circulatory system.

Ground Floor: Where Collective Ritual Begins

The shared living space at ground level is where the family converges. Timber shelving lines the concrete walls, and a planted bed in the foreground introduces greenery as a spatial buffer rather than decoration. The kitchen and dining area sit at the heart of daily ritual: cooking, eating, gathering. Bulanga places this communal programme at the base of the house deliberately, ensuring that every generation passes through the shared zone on their way up or down. Transitional spaces are activated throughout the plan; corridors become reading nooks or plant-filled buffers, eliminating dead square footage.

The staircase itself does more than move people between floors. It doubles as seating and storage, turning a typically utilitarian element into usable domestic surface. In a house this compact, every centimetre of section needs to justify its existence, and Bulanga treats that discipline as a design driver rather than a limitation.

Vertical Stacking as Generational Logic

The section drawing makes the project's organizing principle explicit. Four floors are stacked within the single volume, connected by a continuous stairwell that terminates beneath a rooftop skylight structure. Two skylights and a diagonally oriented ridge capture sun from the northwest and southeast, flooding the interiors with daylight despite the surrounding urban density. This is not just a daylighting strategy; it is a symbolic gesture. The shared light source visually connects every level of the house, an architectural metaphor for lineage and familial continuity.

The axonometric drawing reinforces this reading. Yellow accent walls mark moments of intensity within the concrete frame, and the angled glazed roof hovers above the stairwell as a luminous crown. The top floor, reserved for the two daughters, becomes the brightest space in the house. Its open plan accommodates play, rest, and film nights, making it both the symbolic and literal apex of the domestic section. Ventilation is maximized through layered fenestration and stacked openings, ensuring that airflow follows the same vertical logic as the light.

Privacy Without Isolation

The real achievement here is tonal. Each generation gets its own floor: the grandparents their quiet, the parents their functionality, the children their freedom. Yet the house never fractures into disconnected units. Common spaces at transition zones encourage interaction without mandating it. The stairwell acts as a social condenser, and the skylights bind the interior into a single luminous whole. Bulanga replaces the Western convention of room compartmentalization with a flowing, layered spatial approach that treats the extended family not as a problem to be solved but as a programme to be celebrated.

Why This Project Matters

Multi-generational housing is not a niche concern. As urban plots shrink and housing costs climb, the question of how to consolidate diverse domestic needs into a single compact form becomes central to contemporary residential practice. Bulanga's project offers a persuasive answer: stack the generations vertically, activate every transitional space, and use daylight as a unifying medium. The result is a house that is not merely compact but complete.

3-in-1 Functionality demonstrates that empathy is a design tool, not a sentiment. By understanding the specific rhythms of a Romanian family of six, from the grandparents' need for calm to the children's need for play, Bulanga produces architecture that responds to emotional as well as spatial realities. It is a reminder that the best small houses are not clever exercises in miniaturization; they are generous acts of spatial imagination.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Stefania Bulanga

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Project credits: 3 in 1 by Stefania Bulanga.