25/09/2026
Walk past these townhouses and the facade changes its mind.
From the front: generous windows, three doors, three numbers. Open, calm, legible.
From the side: almost no glass. Brick piers, one after another, catching the afternoon light like the pages of a closed book.
Same building. No tricks. Just geometry with a purpose.
The purpose is privacy. Every window sits deep behind its brick pier. Stand in front of your own door and you see into your own living room. Walk along the street and you see brick. The oblique view; the one neighbours and passers-by actually have is closed.
The frontal view; the one that belongs to you; is open. The facade decides who gets to look in, without a single curtain.
The setback works the same way vertically. The top floor steps back from the street edge, so from the pavement the row reads as two storeys plus a roofline. The third floor disappears behind the parapet and returns as a terrace. Street stays human-scaled; residents get sky. In German planning: a Staffelgeschoss. In human terms: the floor with the best breakfast.
Then the brick. This is Caputh, just outside Potsdam, where 19th-century Prussia built in pale yellow brick (Vandersanden ) the Schinkel school’s material of choice. Stüler, Schinkel’s pupil, carried it into the village church across from Schloss Caputh in 1852. We didn’t copy it. We continued it: mixed sandy tones so every hour of daylight repaints the wall slightly differently, and paving in the same family so ground and wall read as one landscape.
Dark window frames aren’t a style choice either. They’re there so your eye reads the brick, not the window. A window is a hole. Let it be a hole.
Why we care: nobody looks at a building straight on except the photographer. Everyone else sees it at 20°, walking, half-distracted, holding a dog leash. Design for that person, and for the person inside who’d rather not be seen by them.
Save this for the next time someone tells you privacy means smaller windows.
Townhouses, Caputh, Brandenburg.
