Georgia 
There is a particular quality that some houses have — a gravity that makes guests settle in rather than sit on the edge of their chairs. El House A Warm Refuge Conducive To Intimate Gatherings, completed by Jakarta-based Wahana Architects, has that quality in abundance. From the street at dusk, two warm-lit volumetric masses rise behind a deeply patterned dark perforated screen wall, framed by mature tropical trees. It reads less like a gate and more like a slow exhale before you arrive somewhere worth being.
That first impression is not accidental. Every decision here — from the brown-toned secondary skin wrapping the right wing to the slender reflective pond threading between the two volumes — was made in the service of one clearly stated ambition: a home that holds people warmly and lets them belong to it.
The Project
El House sits on a 730 square metre site in Jakarta, Indonesia, and spreads across 1,158 square metres of built area. The project was designed by Wahana Architects — led by Rudy Kelana, with design team members Ruth Connie Rajagukguk and Gloria Gracia leading the work — for a client who wanted a home that could genuinely serve as a gathering place for extended family, close friends, and professional colleagues across generations.
That brief shaped every spatial and material decision. Rather than designing a house that parcels life into separate, closed rooms, Wahana Architects organized the plan around a central social core — an open living and dining area — from which all other spaces radiate. The concept of layering, both materially and spatially, governs the entire project: two distinct volumes are separated by a narrow transitional corridor framed by a linear reflective pond, creating a moment of pause between the more public and more private parts of the home. The result is a house that feels anchored and contemplative from the outside, and genuinely alive on the inside.
SaveThe Spaces
The Entry Sequence at Night
Approaching the house after dark, the entry sequence reveals itself in layers. A timber-clad soffit extends over the covered driveway, its warm grain lit from below by recessed downlights. Behind it, a ribbed vertical screen in a warm tone marks the garage wall, while the main brown rendered volume climbs above, spot-lit against the deep blue sky. The dark perforated block screen wall runs along the property edge, its geometric diamond-triangle pattern casting fragmented shadows on the paving below. It is a composed arrival — nothing rushed, nothing incidental.
SaveThe Facade and Secondary Skin
Seen in daylight from street level, the right wing of the house is wrapped in a rough-textured terracotta-brown render that reads almost like raw earth. The surface is deliberately matte and tactile, not polished. A recessed square window opening cuts through it at upper-floor level, and a figure stands at the aperture — a reminder that behind the sculptural exterior is simply a place where people live. Below, the dark geometric perforated screen wall runs the full width of the plot, its pattern of triangulated forms creating a visual buffer that is permeable to light and air without being transparent.
SaveThe Covered Outdoor Terrace
On the ground level, a shaded outdoor terrace sits beneath dark steel pergola beams that filter the Jakarta sky into thin parallel bands of light. The floor is polished concrete, and the back wall is clad in rough dark volcanic stone, in front of which dense tropical planting — banana palms, broad-leafed shrubs, a mature tree growing through the deck — creates an almost jungle-like enclosure. Two dark upholstered sofas face each other across the space. A single sculptural red chair sits to the left, and its color lands like a punctuation mark in an otherwise deeply tonal, restrained palette. This is an outdoor room designed for the kind of unhurried conversation that happens when there is nowhere urgent to be.
SaveThe Entry Hall and Perforated Screen Interior
Step inside and the first interior space is a contained entry corridor that borrows architectural vocabulary from the facade and brings it inward. A large-scale perforated metal screen — its geometric triangular pattern matching the exterior block wall — spans the end wall, backed by a glimpse of garden beyond. To the left, a large-format abstract painting in deep reds and oranges leans against a warm timber credenza; a monstera plant in a dark ceramic pot sits beside a stack of books. A dark organic wood sculpture occupies the foreground, grounding the space. The ceiling is raw concrete-toned plaster, and the floor is polished stone. The whole composition feels curated without being rigid — like someone has lived here long enough to know what they love.
SaveThe Transitional Corridor and Reflective Pond
The architectural device that most defines El House as a concept is the narrow passage running between the two volumes. Here, a dark timber-clad staircase with warm walnut-toned treads and a glass balustrade ascends on the left, while on the right a long floor-level reflective water feature — planted with aquatic bowls of dark stone holding tropical water plants — separates the walking surface from a full-height glazed wall. Through that glass, the dining area is fully visible, lit warmly and framed like a scene from outside. The ceiling shifts from a warm timber planked surface over the stair to a grey plaster volume on the right. Indirect LED coves and globe pendant lamps cast a measured, amber-toned glow. This corridor is not circulation — it is a moment of transition designed to slow you down, let you look, and let the water beside you do the quiet work of resetting your attention before you enter the social core.
SaveThe Living and Dining Core Seen from the Pond Corridor
From a slightly elevated viewpoint in the transitional zone, looking across the reflective pond and through the full-height glazed facade, the social core of El House comes into full view. The living area holds a deep tan upholstered sofa with timber base, flanked by low tables. A dark perforated screen panel separates the sitting area from the dining zone beyond, where a long pendant fixture hangs over chairs arranged around a table. The rear wall of the living room is entirely glazed, looking directly into the tropical garden and pool beyond. The dark stone floor continues from inside to outside, erasing the boundary. Several dark stone bowls with water plants in the foreground pond connect the transitional zone to the interior, making the whole sequence feel like one continuous landscape rather than a series of separate rooms.
SaveThe Living Room Looking Toward the Garden and Pool
Inside the living room, the garden wall is the room. Floor-to-ceiling glazing spans the full width, and beyond it a dark volcanic stone retaining wall frames an explosion of tropical monstera, ficus, and broad-leaf planting beside a narrow lap pool. Two tubular chrome-and-leather chairs — Breuer-style in silhouette — sit close to the glass, positioned precisely to face the greenery. A dark upholstered sectional and a caramel-toned cushioned sofa face each other over a round low table. The ceiling is flat grey plaster with recessed spots. The overall palette — deep charcoal seating, warm caramel, polished grey stone floor — reads as dark, warm, and intentional. Rain on the glass in the photograph only deepens the sense of shelter and enclosure that this room was built to provide.
SaveThe Dining Area and Perforated Screen Divider
The dining zone occupies the same open volume as the living room but is defined by a row of tall, dark perforated metal panels — free-standing, evenly spaced — that create a visual boundary without closing the space. Their geometric patterning filters light and view between zones, casting intricate shadows across the polished stone floor. Through the full-height glazing on the right, the transitional staircase corridor is visible, with a figure moving through it, connecting the interior life of the house back to its circulatory spine. A warm timber dining table edge and grey upholstered chairs appear in the foreground. The ceiling is grey plaster with recessed lighting and a partial timber soffit. The whole scene makes clear how this house manages to feel open and intimate at the same time — it is the layering of screens and glass that does it, creating filtered views between zones rather than hard walls or wide-open vistas.
SaveThe Double-Height Interior Hall Looking Upward
A double-height volume near the interior core reveals the full vertical ambition of the project. The perforated metal screen panels rise two storeys, their triangular pattern consistent from floor to mezzanine rail. An upper-level glass balustrade and dark timber ceiling look down into the space, with a small tropical plant spilling over the edge. At ground level, a glazed panel frames a planted garden pocket — not a full garden, but a small contained gesture of greenery that brings natural light and a sense of the outdoors deep into the plan. To the right, the polished stone floor extends toward what appears to be the kitchen zone, where warm timber joinery and a pendant lamp are visible. The grey textured plaster walls read consistently throughout. This vertical view confirms how the house uses layered screens, selective glazing, and planted voids to keep the interior from ever feeling sealed off from light or nature.
SaveWhat you might carry home
The most directly useful thing El House demonstrates is what a single repeated material element can do for spatial coherence. The dark perforated geometric screen — first seen on the boundary wall, then at the entry interior, then as the dining zone divider, then climbing a full two storeys — is the same idea in five different applications. If you are trying to create a sense of visual unity across an open-plan home, choosing one screen or partition language and using it consistently across zones will do more for coherence than matching furniture sets ever will.
The transitional corridor with its reflective pond is a spatial idea with a genuinely transferable principle: a moment of pause between a public zone and a private one, marked by something sensory — water, a material shift, a change in ceiling height — makes both zones feel more intentional. You do not need a reflective pond to do this. A change in flooring material at the threshold of a living room, or a single plant-filled niche before a bedroom door, works on the same logic. The pause does the psychological work.
The outdoor terrace here is worth studying for one specific reason: it uses a single high-contrast object — that red sculptural chair — to anchor an otherwise entirely tonal, dark-palette space. If your outdoor area feels a little flat or unresolved, introducing one deliberate color departure (not a matching set, not a print, just one considered piece) will give the eye somewhere to land without disrupting the quiet of everything else.
Finally, the way the living room positions seating to face the garden wall rather than a television or a fireplace is a reminder that the strongest focal point in a room is often whatever is outside the glass. If your home has a garden view — even a modest one — it is worth asking whether your sofa is actually oriented toward it, or whether habit has pointed it somewhere else entirely.
SaveEl House A Warm Refuge Conducive To Intimate Gatherings is, at its core, a house built around the belief that architecture is responsible for how people feel in each other’s company. Wahana Architects have delivered something that earns that ambition — a home where the layers of screen, water, glass, and planting do not just look considered, but genuinely change the experience of moving through a place and choosing to stay.
