Halubilo: A Vertical Micro Home for Three Generations on a 40 sqm Lot

Forty square meters of ground is barely enough for a studio apartment, let alone a multigenerational household. Yet Halubilo, a micro home conceived for Baguio City, stacks a grandparents' suite, a family kitchen, private bedrooms, study areas, and a rooftop garden onto exactly that footprint. The result is a four-storey tower where three generations of a Filipino family can live together without retreating from one another or from the city around them. The name itself, derived from a Filipino word meaning "socialize," signals that the project treats togetherness not as a casualty of density but as the very thing density should serve.

Designed by Jaydae Medrano, Halubilo was shortlisted in the Nano Nest 2020 competition. The project responds to a real condition in Baguio City, where urban density, limited land availability, and deep-rooted cultural values around family cohabitation collide. Rather than forcing the Filipino extended family into a Western micro-housing template, Medrano builds the design outward from local climate, local materials, and the daily rituals that bind grandparents, parents, and children together.

A Narrow Tower Dressed in Louvers and Thatched Geometry

Halubilo's street presence is defined by a tall, slender facade wrapped in alternating horizontal louvers and brown triangular panels. The louvers do double duty: they filter Baguio's rainfall and glare while admitting cross ventilation at every level. The triangular panels, rendered in warm earth tones, reference traditional Cordilleran thatched roofing and break the facade into a rhythm that reads as woven rather than stacked. In the rain perspective, the tower holds its own against the downpour, its sheltered ground level drawing pedestrians beneath a canopy that functions as a threshold between public sidewalk and private home.

What the exterior communicates immediately is that this is not a generic vertical extrusion. The shifting panel geometry gives the building a domestic texture at street level, while the louver bands let the tower breathe. For a 40 sqm lot in a dense urban block, achieving that degree of visual and environmental porosity is a serious design accomplishment.

Site Logic and Vernacular Roofing Read Through Axonometry

The axonometric drawing, paired with a satellite map of the surrounding neighborhood, reveals how tightly Halubilo is embedded in Baguio's urban fabric. The brown thatched roof elements visible at the top of the structure are more than ornament. They reference a sustainable material sourcing tradition from the Cordillera region and serve as shading for the rooftop recreation deck. This fourth-floor garden is programmed explicitly for intergenerational bonding: a place where grandparents can tend plants and children can play, connected by a stair that runs the full height of the tower.

Medrano's decision to deploy vernacular building techniques within a contemporary structural frame is deliberate. The thatched elements anchor the design in regional identity while the concrete and louver system addresses the practical demands of vertical living. The axonometric makes this hybrid legible at a glance: modern skeleton, traditional skin.

Interior Sections That Map Daily Life Vertically

A collage of interior renderings and sectional drawings lays bare the vertical zoning strategy that organizes Halubilo from ground to sky. The ground floor houses the living area, the grandparents' bedroom, and a mini garden, placing the eldest family members closest to the street for accessibility. The second floor consolidates dining, kitchen, and service areas into a communal hub at the building's core. Private bedrooms and skylight-lit study areas occupy the third floor, while the fourth floor opens to a garden and recreation deck. This sequence, public to communal to private to shared leisure, is a deliberate inversion of the typical flat plan, turned on its side and stretched upward.

The sectional cuts show how the stack effect drives passive ventilation: air enters at the ground-floor garden and rises through the stairwell and open plan zones, exhausting at the rooftop. Planted zones near windows reinforce this airflow while catering to the grandparents' love of gardening. Sightlines between floors are maintained through careful placement of openings, ensuring that visual connection, not just physical proximity, keeps the family linked across levels.

Floor Plans: Central Stair as Domestic Spine

The floor plans across all four levels confirm the central staircase as the organizational spine of the house. On the ground and second floors, rooms wrap tightly around this core, maximizing usable area on the narrow lot. The kitchen and dining area on the second floor sit immediately adjacent to the stair landing, making the act of gathering for meals almost unavoidable. On the third floor, bedrooms and study nooks occupy the perimeter, pulling natural light from strategically placed skylights. The fourth-floor plan opens up entirely, with the recreation deck and garden freed from interior walls to create a single communal platform under the thatched roof canopy.

The economy of these plans is notable. Every square meter is programmed, yet circulation never feels residual. The stair is not a leftover corridor but the social conduit of the house. Family members moving between floors pass through shared zones, reinforcing the daily encounters that Medrano identifies as the core of Filipino domestic life. Privacy exists, but isolation does not.

Why This Project Matters

Halubilo challenges the assumption that micro housing is inherently individualistic. Much of the global micro home discourse centers on the single occupant: the young professional, the digital nomad, the minimalist. Medrano redirects that conversation toward the multigenerational family unit, a living arrangement that remains the norm across much of Southeast Asia and is increasingly relevant in aging societies worldwide. Designing for three generations on 40 square meters forces decisions about hierarchy, accessibility, and shared ritual that most micro home projects never confront.

The project also demonstrates that cultural specificity and environmental performance are not competing agendas. Thatched roofing, stack-effect ventilation, planted zones, and rooftop gardens all serve both identity and comfort simultaneously. Halubilo does not nostalgically replicate the Cordilleran house; it extracts principles from that tradition and applies them to an urban vertical condition. As a shortlisted entry in Nano Nest 2020, it stands as a clear argument that the smallest footprints can hold the most complex social programs, provided the architect begins with people rather than square meters.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Jaydae Medrano

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Project credits: Halubilo by Jaydae Medrano.