Cube in Cube: A Timber Veil That Turns Suburban Privacy into a Gradient

Suburban housing usually answers the privacy question with a fence, a hedge or a blank side wall. Cube in Cube answers it with a second building. A compact white house sits inside a lighter, permeable cage of vertical timber slats held in a steel frame, and the gap between the two layers does the work that walls normally do. Privacy stops being a switch that is either on or off. It becomes a gradient you can walk through.

Designed by Jana Stachova and awarded a Jury Commendation in Habitats '20, the project sits near the spruce and pine forests of Dobris in the Czech Republic. Its brief is a familiar one: the steady push of individual housing onto the edges of growing cities, where repetitive layouts tend to trade spatial quality for density. Stachova keeps the economics intact with a semi-detached, two-storey type that a developer could build in series, then spends her design effort on the layer that decides how each household meets its neighbours.

A Screen Hung from Steel, Not a Wall

This close view isolates the project's key component: a slender steel beam carrying a run of timber slats against open sky. The screen is suspended, not load-bearing, and that matters. Because it hangs off a frame, it can wrap the upper level and run out over terraces and balconies without thickening the house itself. Hanging from the same beam is a pair of wooden gymnastic rings. They are a small detail, but they show that the frame is useful structure, something an occupant can occupy and adapt, as well as an envelope.

The slats filter views, temper sunlight and produce partial exposure in place of full concealment. From inside, the forest stays visible between the timber members. From a neighbouring plot, the same members close up into a near-solid surface at oblique angles. That asymmetry is the whole argument of the project, and it is achieved with nothing more than spacing and depth.

Repetition That Reads as a Street

Seen through a wire fence and long grass in grey evening light, the row of units shows how the type behaves in multiples. This is the condition the competition brief targeted, and it is where many suburban schemes fall apart into identical boxes. Here the repeated cube gives the cluster a coherent identity, while small shifts in orientation and landscape placement keep the line from becoming a barcode. The slatted skins catch light differently as they turn, so a single rule produces a varied edge.

The Pocket Between Cube and Screen

The balcony detail shows the in-between zone the title promises. A steel edge, a row of timber slats, a glazed door in full sun: the outer layer stands just far enough from the plastered volume to create usable depth. Stachova uses this depth for concealed storage, shaded outdoor rooms and semi-private thresholds where an occupant can step outside without stepping into view.

This is the most transferable idea in the scheme. The glazing on the inner cube can stay generous because the outer layer handles exposure, so the house does not need to choose between large openings and a sense of shelter. The slats also act as passive shading, cutting summer solar gain while letting filtered daylight reach the interiors and reducing the need for mechanical cooling. Privacy and environmental performance come from one element, not two.

White Mass, Timber Veil, Pine Backdrop

The palette is limited to three materials: white plaster for the primary mass, natural timber for the screen and exposed steel for the frame. In the view of three houses on a grassy rise against the pines, the plastered cubes read as solid and monolithic, while the timber layer softens their silhouettes toward the treeline. The vertical rhythm of the slats echoes the trunks behind, and the houses borrow the forest's grain without imitating its forms.

Glimpsed through leafy branches with a parked car in the foreground, the volumes settle into the vegetation instead of standing apart from it. Inside, the plan is compact and direct. Open-plan living spaces face framed views of the landscape, private rooms sit behind the deeper parts of the screen, and circulation is kept short. The material contrast of solid against permeable maps directly onto that programmatic split between open and private.

Lanterns at the Edge of the Road

At night the screen works in reverse. With a street lamp overhead, parked vans alongside and light trails streaking past, the slatted corner glows from within, diffusing interior light into a soft haze instead of exposing rooms to the road. This is the setting where privacy is most tested, beside traffic and in plain view of passers-by. The house turns that exposure into atmosphere, and the cluster becomes a series of luminous volumes along the street instead of a row of lit windows.

Why This Project Matters

Cube in Cube takes a problem most suburban developments ignore and solves it at the scale of the envelope rather than the plot. It accepts the semi-detached, two-storey type and its economic constraints, then shows that one well-considered layer can deliver shading, storage, outdoor living and visual privacy together. That is a realistic proposition, not a speculative one, and it is likely what earned the Jury Commendation.

The broader lesson is about how privacy is defined. Instead of treating it as isolation behind solid walls, Stachova treats it as a set of calibrated thresholds that the inhabitant moves through and controls. As peri-urban housing grows denser across Europe, that shift from barrier to filter offers a useful model: houses that remain open to light and landscape while still protecting the people inside them.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Jana Stachova

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Project credits: Cube in Cube by Jana Stachova Habitats '20 (uni.xyz).