Blankstudio Threads Light and Landscape Through a 10-Meter-Wide House in Chiang Mai

A 10-meter-wide, 34-meter-deep lot in Chiang Mai is the kind of site most architects would treat as a constraint. Blankstudio, led by Satawatch Katlivong, treats it as a thesis. House C+I, completed in 2022, is a 145-square-meter residence for two people that asks a single question over and over: how many ways can you pull daylight into a white volume? The answer, it turns out, is a relentless sequence of courtyards, skylights, glass partitions, and perforated screens that dissolve the boundary between indoors and out until the distinction barely registers.

What makes the project genuinely interesting is not the whiteness itself, which could easily read as generic minimalism, but the discipline with which the house uses its linear site. The plan is essentially a chain of rooms and voids threaded along the lot's depth, each courtyard calibrated to admit light at a different angle and frame a different species of tree. It is a house that takes a simple brief (one bedroom, white, bright) and turns it into a spatial argument about sequence and atmosphere.

A Quiet Street Face

From the street, House C+I barely announces itself. A white corrugated metal fence and an open carport frame the entry without fanfare. The steel structure of the carport shelters a preserved tree in a gravel bed, a move that signals the house's priorities before you step inside. The facade is deliberate in its restraint: no ornamental gestures, no material exhibitionism. It reads as a clean boundary between the neighborhood and the world the architects have built behind it.

The perforated metal wall behind the carport filters views to the interior courtyard without sealing them off entirely. It is a screen, not a barrier, and it sets the tone for the rest of the house, where solid walls and transparent planes alternate in a rhythm that never quite lets you forget you are looking through something.

Courtyards as Rooms

The courtyards in House C+I are not leftover space. They are the organizing logic of the plan. A mature tree stands in gravel beneath a white canopy; a narrow slot between parallel walls admits a linear skylight above a pine and rock garden; olive trees rise from gravel beds ringed by tiled perimeter walls. Each courtyard has its own character, its own light, and its own relationship to the rooms that flank it.

On a site this narrow, the temptation is to push the building envelope to the property line and rely on mechanical systems for comfort. Blankstudio does the opposite, carving away floor area to create outdoor rooms that ventilate and illuminate the spaces around them. In Chiang Mai's tropical climate, where temperatures regularly exceed 35 degrees Celsius, these voids are not luxuries. They are infrastructure.

Screens, Columns, and Thresholds

The house treats the transition between inside and outside as a subject worthy of sustained attention. Covered walkways run alongside planted beds. Glass block screens filter light into corridors. Perforated white panels frame gnarled olive trees against blue sky. These elements are all doing the same work: slowing you down, making you aware of the shift from shade to sun, from enclosed to open.

The covered walkway along the planted courtyard is especially effective. Concrete walls, glass block screens, and the dappled shadow of tree canopies create a passage that feels cooler and more contemplative than any air-conditioned hallway could. It is circulation as experience, not just connective tissue.

The Double-Height Living Room

The main living volume is the heart of the house, and it earns that status through sheer generosity of section. A double-height space opens onto a glass courtyard that separates a cacti garden from the interior seating. A glass balustrade stair rises along one wall, its terrazzo treads catching afternoon light. A suspended ring light floats overhead, its geometry a deliberate counterpoint to the rectilinear envelope.

The tall cacti visible through glass partitions do real work here, anchoring the vertical scale of the room and connecting the interior to the planted courtyards beyond. In a house this white, the green of living things is not decoration. It is the primary material contrast.

Kitchen and Ground Floor Flow

The open-plan living area flows into a kitchen that sits against a glass wall, with sliding doors opening directly to a courtyard where a tree casts dappled shadows across the floor. The polished terrazzo floor runs continuously through the living and kitchen zones, reinforcing the sense that this is a single room punctuated by light rather than divided by walls.

A mezzanine window overlooks the interior volume from above, connecting the upper level to the ground floor visually. The effect is a house that feels larger than its 145 square meters because so many of its spaces are borrowed from one another.

The Bedroom and Upper Level

The single bedroom occupies the upper level, a raised platform bed sitting behind full-height glazed doors that open to a small tree courtyard. The room is spare almost to the point of asceticism: white walls, white railings, a narrow balcony with vertical slats, and glass block screens that filter light without blocking it. For a house designed for two people, it reads as exactly the right amount of enclosure, enough for privacy, not enough to feel separated from the landscape threading through the rest of the plan.

Stairways and Vertical Light

The narrow white stairwell descending toward a tall window that frames greenery is one of the house's most concentrated moments. Terrazzo treads, white walls, and a single vertical slot of glass: nothing else. The restraint is the point. Elsewhere, a glass wall frames a courtyard tree and reflecting pool, and a linear skylight above a planted bed containing pine and gravel mulch draws a stripe of sun across the interior.

These moments add up. Individually, each is a familiar move. Collectively, they create a house where light is never the same twice, where every vertical and horizontal surface has been considered for its capacity to reflect, filter, or frame.

Plans and Drawings

The axonometric drawings reveal what the photographs only hint at: the degree to which the house is organized as a linear sequence of solids and voids along the 34-meter depth of the lot. The two-story volume containing the living room and bedroom sits between courtyards that ventilate and illuminate it from multiple sides. Rooftop solar panels appear in the axonometric, suggesting an energy strategy that complements the passive cooling provided by the courtyards and cross-ventilation.

The elevation drawings confirm the street facade's deliberate flatness and show the longitudinal section cutting through the chain of spaces. What reads in plan as a simple linear arrangement turns out, in section, to be a series of carefully varied ceiling heights and floor levels that give each room its own proportion.

Why This Project Matters

House C+I is not trying to reinvent the courtyard house. It is trying to prove that the type still has things to teach us about living in tropical climates on constrained urban lots. The commitment to natural light and ventilation over mechanical systems, the willingness to sacrifice floor area for outdoor rooms, the decision to preserve existing trees rather than clear the site: these are choices that feel increasingly urgent as cities across Southeast Asia densify and the pressure to maximize buildable area grows.

Blankstudio has delivered a house that is legible in its logic but rich in its experience. The brief was almost absurdly simple: one bedroom, white, bright. The result is a project that demonstrates how a tight program, when coupled with genuine spatial intelligence and respect for climate, can produce architecture that punches well above its square meterage. For anyone designing small houses on narrow lots in warm climates, this is a project worth studying closely.

House C+I, designed by blankstudio (lead architect: Satawatch Katlivong), Chiang Mai, Thailand. 145 m², completed 2022. Photography by Panoramic Studio.

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