Gelareh House transforms an existing weekend villa on the outskirts of Tehran into a permanent home. Rather than demolishing and replacing the original building, designed by Iranian architect Firouz Firouz, the project expands it to accommodate the permanent habitation of the new owners, who extended the property through the acquisition of three adjacent orchard plots.
In addressing the question of extension, the project neither repeats and imitates the existing building nor attaches something entirely independent to it. Instead, the new additions emerge from the spatial and constructive logic of the original villa. Although retaining its material character and construction techniques, they introduce a different geometry and form. The intervention can be understood as a graft: new needs and demands are joined onto the existing body of the villa, from which new architectural limbs emerge and grow. Expansion is therefore read not as an addition, but as a process of growth through transplants.
The orthogonal geometry of the original villa develops into a fluid, curvilinear system of interconnected vaults. Like the articulated shell of a segmented organism, these vaults twist, overlap, slide across one another, and gradually decrease in height, creating a continuous sequence that grows from the original body, making the boundary between the two imperceptible at first glance.
The perception of gradual growth is reinforced through color. The solid color of the original villa evolves into a chromatic spectrum extending from the center toward the new branches. This progression renders the process of transformation visible, making each segmented shell appear as a distinct stage in the building’s evolution.
The overlapping arrangement of the segments allows natural light to enter from above and along the walls, creating diverse spatial atmospheres and multiple ways of experiencing the garden.
The new living spaces occupy the treeless clearings of the orchard while enclosing selected portions of it, establishing a continuous relationship between habitation and cultivation. The orchard is no longer simply a landscape viewed from the house, but an active component of everyday life. Living, tending, harvesting, and moving through the orchard become intertwined within a single domestic environment.
