“Design the Most Beautiful House on the Block,” They Said

How do you design the most beautiful house on a street where nearly every home was already created by a well-known architect? That was the challenge given to Powerhouse Company for Villa CG in the Dutch city of Enschede. And there was one more condition. The budget was tight. The architects could have responded with something extravagant, a house designed to grab more attention than every home around it. But they did the opposite. They reduced the design to a few very clear elements, a dark brick core, two transparent glass wings, and one long white roof tying the whole composition together. Villa CG tries to stand out through simplicity. From the street, the house looks almost perfectly symmetrical. At the center, a solid brick volume protects the more private parts of daily life. At both ends, large walls of glass already hint that the house is much more open than the front facade first suggests. On the street-facing side, almost everything feels protective. The bricks are long, narrow, and dark. The openings are carefully controlled, and your eye is eventually drawn to one single point. The front door, custom-designed for the house, and wrapped in a warm, gold-toned metal. That facade creates a very specific first impression. The house feels solid, quiet, almost secretive. But once you walk around it, that image starts to disappear. A white roof stretches horizontally across the house. It brings the different parts together. It makes the building feel lower, and it turns the solid and transparent volumes into one continuous line. Even though the house has two stories, it still feels long and close to the ground. Instead of visually growing upward, it stretches out to the sides, almost as if the roof were continuing the line of the landscape itself. On the garden side, the brick volume gives way to a much more transparent house. The living room opens to the greenery. The kitchen fills one of the glass wings. The office sits in the other. And the architecture, which felt protected from the street, begins to extend toward the terrace and the garden. At the center of the house, where the structure feels most solid, a circular opening appears above the staircase. It is a small gesture among all the long, straight lines. But the skylight brings daylight into the most protected part of the house, and introduces a curve into an architecture shaped by symmetry and horizontal lines. Villa CG is not simply open or closed. It is both at the same time. Closed where it needs privacy, transparent where it can connect with the landscape, heavy at the center, light at the edges. The brick creates shelter. The glass opens up the views. And the white roof keeps those parts from feeling like separate buildings. It holds everything together as one composition. The color of the brick is closely matched to the walnut used inside. So the house's more enclosed central volume does not stop at the facade. Its presence continues through the interiors, now with a warmer, more comfortable feel. At the back, the roof reaches out even farther. It shelters the terrace, and creates a space that doesn't fully belong to the interior or the garden. The living room ends in glass. The floor continues outside. And the landscaping reaches all the way beneath the deep overhang. The roof is not just a beautiful line across the facade. It creates shade, protects the terrace, connects the spaces, and allows the house to stay open to the garden while still feeling sheltered. Reflective, turning to the original challenge, Villa CG began with a request that is almost impossible to measure. After all, there is no objective formula for creating the most beautiful house on a street. And architecture alone cannot decide whether that goal was actually achieved. But the response is very clear. Instead of trying to win through extravagance, the house relies on balance. Between brick and glass, weight and transparency, street and garden, protection and openness. Working within a limited budget, Powerhouse Company did not try to design the house that shouted the loudest. They tried to create a home where every part felt exactly where it belonged. And maybe that was the real meaning behind the original request. Not to build the flashiest house on the street, but one that would be hard to forget.