Brief
The family wanted to keep the structure's familiarity while making daily movement, ventilation, and shared rooms feel less compressed.
Lightwell House treats daylight as the main renovation material. A modest vertical opening reorganizes rooms that had become dark, deep, and difficult to read.
- Type
- Renovation Strategy
- Location
- Bhaktapur
- Year
- 2024
- Status
- Strategy package
Case notes
The case study is organized around intent, constraint, and the spatial decisions that make the project useful.
Context
The existing house had strong walls and a practical footprint, but the center of the plan received little natural light. The proposal works within that constraint rather than replacing the whole spatial order.
Strategy
- Introduce a lightwell where it can improve multiple rooms at once.
- Clarify circulation so movement no longer cuts diagonally through shared areas.
- Use fewer, better-positioned openings to make the old walls feel intentional.
Materials
Lime-washed walls, repaired timber, clay floor tones, and simple metalwork keep the renovation connected to the existing house.
Gallery
Rooms in sequence.
Large views are paired with short captions so the page reads as a spatial walk-through, not a grid of thumbnails.
Specifications
A compact record of scope, role, and the spatial concerns that shaped the work.
- Scope
- Renovation strategy
- Primary move
- New lightwell and circulation reset
- Focus
- Daylight, ventilation, retained structure
- Role
- Strategy, planning, opening studies
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