Navid Nasrollahzadeh Carves Light and Greenery into a 100 Square Meter Tehran Plot

A hundred square meters is barely enough for a parking lot, let alone a family home. Yet on Dolat Street, one of Tehran's older and more congested neighborhoods, architect Navid Nasrollahzadeh has delivered Hanna House: a 248 square meter residence that reads less like a constrained urban infill and more like a vertical garden threaded with light. Completed in 2023, the project takes a plot just five meters wide and twenty meters deep, hemmed in on three sides, and turns its slenderness into a spatial virtue.

What makes Hanna House genuinely interesting is not its compactness but the ambition it packs into that compactness. Rather than conceding to the usual Tehran formula of maximized floor area and minimal openings, Nasrollahzadeh invests square meters in voids: light wells, courtyards, terraces, and a central staircase capped with glass. The result is a house that breathes where it should feel suffocated, a project that treats daylight and planting not as luxuries but as structural organizing principles.

Arriving Through Brick and Bamboo

The approach sequence sets the tone immediately. A brick-lined passageway with cobblestone paving leads visitors past flanking beds of bamboo toward the entry courtyard. The narrow proportions of the plot are not hidden; they are staged. Overhead, a timber slatted skylight filters sunlight into the transitional space, giving the ground plane a dappled quality that softens the mineral palette of brick and stone.

From the street, the facade in buff Azarakhsh brick presents a projecting glazed bay window that catches reflections of the mature plane trees lining Dolat Street. It is a modest face for a dense neighborhood, one that respects the existing streetwall rhythm while signaling through its bay and its generous glazing that something more open lies behind.

The Vertical Core: Brick, Glass, and Growing Things

The most striking move in the house is its central light well. Looking straight up through the brick-lined shaft, you see skylights at the top and climbing vines working their way along the exposed masonry. It is a miniature canyon carved out of the building section, and it does the heavy lifting of distributing daylight to rooms that would otherwise be landlocked. The exposed brick extends continuously from ground level to rooftop, giving the void a material coherence that keeps it from feeling like a leftover gap.

Above, a glazed atrium with a steel frame caps the composition, turning the shaft into a stack-effect chimney that pulls warm air upward while letting rain and seasons register inside the house. The brick floor visible through the atrium reads as a continuation of the courtyard below, collapsing the perceived distance between ground and sky. For a house on a hundred square meter plot, these vertical strategies are not optional. They are the entire plan.

Internal Courtyards and the Staircase as Garden

A small internal courtyard introduces a planted bed directly beneath the exposed brick wall, with a steel staircase on timber treads ascending alongside. The detailing here is deliberate: steel and timber against rough masonry, green leaves against warm red tones. The staircase is not tucked into a corner or enclosed in a shaft. It occupies a visible, daylit position, turning vertical circulation into an event rather than an afterthought.

From below, the textured brick facade reveals protruding balconies and deep window reveals. The bare branches of a tree reflected in the upper glazing remind you how close the neighboring structures sit. In a neighborhood this dense, every balcony projection and every offset from the property line represents a conscious sacrifice of buildable area in exchange for air and light. Nasrollahzadeh has made those trades consistently and without apology.

Living with Green: Kitchen, Courtyard, Bedroom

The kitchen and dining area demonstrate how a small house can feel generous without being large. Olive-green cabinetry picks up the color of the planted courtyard visible through full-height glazing, collapsing the boundary between cooking space and garden. The grey dining table sits in a zone that is simultaneously interior room and observation deck for the planting beyond. There is no wasted transition: you move from worktop to greenery in a single glance.

Upstairs, a bedroom uses a timber-slatted wall as a warm counterpoint to the lush foliage framed by its large window. The palette throughout the house stays restrained: brick, timber, steel, and planting. Handcrafted ceramic details appear in places, introducing texture that recalls Tehran's craft traditions without veering into nostalgia. The discipline of the material selection is what holds the house together across its tight dimensions.

The Rooftop as a Private Landscape

At the top of the house, a covered terrace with a timber ceiling and brick walls opens onto a small pool. The rooftop level mixes enclosed, semi-open, and fully exposed zones, creating a sequence of microclimates on a footprint that barely exceeds fifty square meters. Wooden walls and greenery wrap the pool area, turning it into a private retreat that borrows sky without exposing inhabitants to the surrounding rooftop clutter of a dense Tehran block.

The entry courtyard's slatted skylight reappears here as a motif, linking ground and roof through shared material language. It is a smart doubling: the same element that shades your arrival also structures your rooftop experience. In a house with no room for redundancy, every detail has to work twice.

Why This Project Matters

Tehran's residential fabric is overwhelmingly defined by speculative apartment blocks that prioritize sellable area over livability. Hanna House offers a pointed counter-argument. By investing floor area in voids, courts, and terraces, Nasrollahzadeh proves that a family house on a hundred square meter plot can feel expansive, connected to the sky, and saturated with daylight. The lesson is transferable: even in the most constrained urban conditions, the decision to build less and open more yields a richer domestic experience.

Beyond its local context, the project joins a growing body of work in the Middle East and South Asia that treats the courtyard not as a historical citation but as an active environmental device. The light well, the planted voids, and the rooftop landscape are all working elements that regulate climate, frame views, and create private outdoor space where the city offers none. Hanna House is compact architecture with large ambitions, and on a plot this tight, that clarity of purpose is what makes everything hold together.

Hanna House, designed by Navid Nasrollahzadeh, Tehran, Iran. 248 m². Completed 2023. Photography by Ashkan Yadolahi and Leili Amooshahi.

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