Residential / Architectural Visualization — 2010 · Ayi Mensah

Ayi Mensah

A street view of a two-storey house with a cream rendered upper floor over a red brick ground floor, under a red hipped tile roof with wide white eaves. White quoins and window surrounds frame a tall arched stair window on the right and an arched porch on columns at the centre. A white boundary wall on brick piers set with wrought-iron panels runs across the front, broken by a pair of tall decorative gates through which a red saloon is visible on the paved block driveway, and mature trees throw dappled shadow over the pavement.

Four 2010 visualizations of an estate housing scheme in Ghana, published as two blog posts on the same evening. They show closely related two-storey houses in three finish schemes — cream over red brick, pale sage green, and taupe with stone cladding — the last seen from both the street and the garden.

Both posts went up on the evening of 22 July 2010, twenty-two minutes apart, as AYI MENSAH 1 and AYI MENSAH 2. Neither carries labels or the tool list the studio usually spelled out, and the only prose is a single line on the first: “Ayi Mensah 1 is one option for an estate housing scheme to be built in Ghana.” The second post reads as another option against the same brief. No designer or architect is credited on either, which leaves the studio as the only named party on the record.

Four views, three houses, one plan. The massing holds across all of them — a two-storey block under a hipped roof, a colonnaded ground-floor veranda, a first-floor balcony over one wing, and a tall arched window marking the stair — while the finishes change from frame to frame. One house pairs cream render with a red brick ground floor and a red tile roof; another is rendered pale sage green under the same red roof; a third is taupe-rendered with a stone-clad bay and boundary wall, and that one is shown twice, from the street and from the garden.

The street views are as much about the compound as the house. Each sits behind a boundary wall of brick or stone piers set with wrought-iron panels, and a pair of tall decorative gates opens onto a paved block driveway that sweeps up from the kerb, so the approach is choreographed before the front door is reached. The garden views turn to the opposite problem of outdoor living: a colonnaded veranda laid out with wicker seating, a paved terrace cut with strips of lawn, and low white retaining walls that keep the garden open while holding the plot on its slope.

All four are signed bottom-right with the studio’s the SEED. V.1.1 / 2010 series mark, www.rdvstudiosgh.com and the Revival Design + VFX Studios logo. The files still carry their working names — 15_done, from_back_3, from_front1 — and the garden view from the first post reached the blog as a PNG rather than a JPEG, so it remains by some distance the heaviest plate in the set. The two posts are on blogspot, Ayi Mensah 1 and Ayi Mensah 2.

The garden side of a two-storey house rendered pale sage green under a red hipped tile roof with broad white cornices. A ground-floor colonnade of square white piers opens onto a paved veranda furnished with wicker chairs, and a first-floor balcony with a white balustrade projects over the right wing. Low white walls and a paved terrace cut with strips of lawn run in front, with a twin-head lamp post at the right and dense trees and shrubs framing both sides of the view.

The garden view of the same house type in a third finish: taupe rendered walls over a stone-clad ground-floor bay, under a dark grey hipped roof with white trim. An arched white colonnade shades a paved veranda laid with wicker seating, a first-floor balcony sits over the right wing, and a raised terrace of pale paving striped with lawn steps down behind low white retaining walls, with planting and a twin-head lamp post at the right.

The street view of that taupe and stone house: white ornamental gates between stone-clad piers open onto a broad paved driveway sweeping up from the kerb, with a gabled porch canopy on white columns at the centre and a tall arched stair window to the right. A lower wing at the left carries two panelled garage doors beneath a balustraded terrace, the boundary wall continues as stone facing with metal railings, and young trees and a paved footpath run along the road in the foreground.