Cake Houses Are Economical Wooden Homes That Are Reinventing Housing In The Czech Republic

The Cake House is an innovative and modular home concept that was presented at the Designblok festival in Prague this year. The project was founded by Matyáš Švejdík, Pavel Špringl, and Šimon Marek, and described as an “architectural recipe for modular wooden houses”. The Cake House is intended to be a pitched-roof house that can be adapted and customized to the various needs of different people. It was presented at Designblok with the help of an interactive model display allowing visitors to play around with it, creating diverse home layouts.

Designer: Matyáš Švejdík, Pavel Špringl, and Šimon Marek

“The main idea of Cake Houses stands on the belief that if you come up with good basic space and construction principles, you can then plot variable and individual designs fast and reliably because of the standardization,” said Švejdík. The overall shape of the house is maintained at all times, although, the length is personalized according to the customer’s needs. The Cake House utilizes an online configurator to try out hundreds of different layouts and internal and external finishes. The design is then converted into a wooden construction built using prefabricated parts.

Currently, one Cake House has been built. It features a pitched roof and timber cladding which is seen in the Cake House design, this helps ensure that the home is affordable and economical. Although certain design factors have been implemented such as avoiding long dark corridors and adding large windows that connect the interiors of the home to the garden.

“The mainstream look and overall design quality of family houses in the Czech Republic is mostly poor – the reason being the fact that these houses are catalog projects usually without identity and deeper creative thought,” Švejdík said. “But for most people, this way of building their home is easier, cheaper, and more certain than working with an architect on multiple levels,” he added. “We decided to design a project that brings the advantages of good architecture and standardization together.” “We then came up with the basic principles of the construction and used our programming knowledge to create a system of assembling parts, and now we are able to create various configurations suitable for different people, families, or budgets.”