Beni-A Residence | Abdul-Rauf Issahaque

Project Name: Beni-A Residence
Location: North Airport Road, Accra, Ghana
Project year: Design – 2017
Construction – December 2020
Completion – December 2023
Main House: Floor Area – 260m² / Footprint: 130m²
Outhouse Floor Area: 70m² / Footprint: 42m²
Architect: Abdul-Rauf Issahaque
Structural Engineer: Ernest Worla Tornu
Main Contractor: Amzoon Construction
Earth Blocks Supply: Geointell Housing
Carpentry: Daniel Ansah

Text narration by the Architect ……..

Beni-A Residence was designed as a home to provide a versatile living space for a single family, and occasionally visiting relatives in Accra. The house is located at Airport Residential Area – one of the most affluent neighbourhoods in the city with mostly high-middle to high income residents. The design was inspired by the need to create a family home with an atmosphere of calmness and subtlety to which its occupants can return after the daily hustle and bustle of the city.

It was a 6-year long slow process with pauses in-between, of working closely with the client and guiding her to build her dream house. The design used strategies that harmonized indoors with outdoors, and common areas with private areas as a contemporary spatial translation of the Ghanaian compound house typology. Beni-A conceptually creates a balance between scale, materiality, and function. This approach enabled the project to clearly communicate its motive to addressing the brief and responding to the city contextually.

A continuous study of the material palette and construction technique was an important part of the design process, through the exploration of environmental and economical solutions with considerations on the available local craftsmanship. The project was conceived with the idea to express a raw aesthetic of the materiality in a minimalist approach through the use of a limewashed compressed earth blocks envelope with a skeletal concrete structure. As a result of the increasing demand for fast and cost-effective construction of homes in Ghana, many local crafts are unable to compete with their sophisticated counterparts, hence, making local skills gradually rare.

Additionally, the trend of excessive use of highly industrialized imported building materials and construction techniques in Ghana in recent times shifts the focus of skills training making it extremely challenging to work with local crafts. Hence, the implications of designing a building in earth, wood, and crafted-metal parts meant a very slowed-down process which relied heavily on the limited availability of skilled labour from small scale workshops and entrepreneurs

On approach to the site, the building offers a visual invitation expressed through the orientation of its cantilevered common room and roof terrace towards the street curve, framing the neighborhood through the full glass gabled window. Made possible by its shallow form and large openings, the building benefits from an improved indoor microclimate and air quality by means of natural cross-ventilation throughout all its spaces.

Beyond the textured aesthetics of the limewashed compressed earth block envelope the exterior walls also play a key role of facilitating the building to breathe. The roof structure on the other hand also forms an important part of the interior design and amplifies the volume of the rooms while celebrating the tropical hardwood of its exposed rafters.

Similar to the idea of the compound house typology in Ghana, where common spaces in the form of courtyards formed the central core with individual rooms and private spaces to the edges, Beni-A Residence condenses the common areas into versatile indoor spaces that bridge the private areas. But in contrast to the horizontal arrangement of spaces in the traditional compound house typology, the house conceptually inverts this arrangement vertically, reducing the footprint of the building to half of its total area.

The cantilevered gable over the front door creates a sheltered multi-use entrance without disrupting openness of the forecourt garden. All these gestures contribute to addressing the scarcity of land in the city and the need to go vertical and reduce building footprints and more greenery while preserving the traditionally-influenced lifestyle in a modern Ghanaian family house.

Open courts have also been integrated into the house to encourage an indoor-outdoor use of spaces in a contemporary fashion and through the use of double-volume spaces for ample daylight. Since moving in, the family have expressed how much versatility the building offers them and how it continuously inspires them to personalize the spaces and make a home out of it.