Medina House

medina house

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Medina House
Christoph Kicherer and Yves Marbrier
Tunis 1995

The property acquired by photographer Christoph Kicherer and architect Yves Marbrier was a typical seventeenth century house in the Medina, arranged on two floors around a courtyard. Many of the rooms retained fine original features, including tiled surfaces, vaulted ceilings, slender columns, stone floors and small, high windows with coloured glass. Here was a house perfectly susceptible to more conventionally western patterns of life, without the need for radical change.

Vast, unadorned stone tubs and solid block basins with smooth hemispherical cavities are installed in the bathrooms. Outside the accretions are cleared away and stairs added to improve roof access, these housed within the drama of a narrow slot nine metres high and open to the sky.