It’s small but it’s big
Trasacco Valley, one of ever-growing Accra’s outlying neighborhoods, is a gated community. The development is filled with enormous mansions, designed in various fantastic derivations of European styles, and painted in bright tropical colors. The development is aimed at Ghana’s upper-class. In the middle of this development, Olympio designed a small house for her friend Ron Quist. Beginning in 1998, the project was completed in 2004.
Like all of Olympio’s projects, this one was ideologically-based. With Quist as willing partner-in-crime, Olympio decided to make his house in the smallest, but the grandest, in Tresaco Valley. The goal: to prove yet again to the Ghanaian upper class that it is not necessary to build big to build grand., unnecessary to build up the entire plot. Rather, the land itself, properly landscaped, properly culled for its natural materials, can provide much of the grandeur of a building, and costs, imports, and damage to the environment can be drastically cut as a result.
As always, Alero began by asking the client, “What is your dream? What image do you see in your mind?” In a candid interview, Quist said it started with his desire with for an L-shaped house with a blue roof. From there, Olympio created a beautiful little house which combines her love for natural materials with the clean contemporary look Quist was after. Another of her talents, the placement of the building on the site to the best effect, can be seen here too, in the angle at which the house meets the street on one side, and the pool on the other.
“The statement is inside,” Quist says. Indeed, the house is unusual for Ghana. The main door opens directly onto an open-plan living/dining room which opens out onto the pool in the back, flooding the central space of the house with light. The bedrooms are small and few. The entire design is aimed at proving how a small amount of space can create a very spacious interior that fulfills all a client’s needs.
“The outside,” Quist continues, “is supposed to be a reproof. But a polite one.”