Type 7 | Full Circle

Full Circle

How to design a house on a circular floor plan.

There’s a reason we don’t see circular houses more often, very few of the “standard” features and practices that architects are used to working with just don’t fit when everything has to align on a concentric grid. Those who’ve tried always arrive at their own unique approach, like the simply named “Round House” by Feldman Architecture in California.

A circular kitchen makes up the heart of the house, and everything fans out from there. The whole house is belted with a wrap-around balcony, allowing you to walk its full circumference without stepping inside. Every room is a distinct experience from the next, slotting together like slices of a pie, each accompanied by its own section of the horizon but converging on the same point at the centre.

It’s a strangely logical way to lay out a building.

Where a normal house slots together like a puzzle, a circular house often follows the structure of more organic systems like cells, atoms or the rings of a tree, challenging the norms of traditional design processes but arriving at something altogether more natural than you might have first thought of.