Rural housing

Situated on the grounds of a former garden centre and nursery, De Tuin van Elden is an infill project in Arnhem. Beautifully located near the Meinerswijk floodplains, Arnhem’s city centre is but a stone’s throw away. The urban plan that was developed for this site is a tongue-in-cheek elaboration of the higgledy-piggledy rural morphology of Elden village, which is perched on the Rhine dike and was swallowed by the town of Arnhem shortly after the war. In the plan, which focuses on green spaces and large bodies of water, a high degree of differentiation in new (rural) architecture was programmed. NEXIT was asked to develop a number of exceptional accents among the other various project-based homes. A barn-home with shed-studio and two homes by the water’s edge were the first responses to this request. The architecture of these four individual houses is rural in scale, formal presence and materiality, yet modern and contemporary in its detailing, and has an exceptional spatial structure.