House in a pine wood
family house
project detail
The investors had bought an unfinished house in the 1990s and had completed it to the style of the time. Yet they found out with time that the house had not met their functional requirements and even had not represented their aesthetic sentiments. However, they meanwhile had become rooted in the place, established relationships they had not wanted to severe by moving away. And it would have been difficult to find such a magical place hidden in pines. That is why they approached us asking whether it could be possible to refurbish/rebuild the house so that it could become more comfortable for them and they could better identify with it.
So, we started looking for a solution in the vertical arrangement of the house, in its relation to the surrounding landscape. It turned out that the street rose along the house meeting the basement level at its lowest point and, therefore, it could be entered on foot or by car without ramps and stairs.
Moreover, there was no problem to grade the garden to the basement level without damaging the pines growing there. By doing so, we could turn the basement into a ground floor on the street and garden level. We positioned the entries and a family room here and the intimate bedroom storey with an en-suite master bedroom, two maisonette children’s suites and a guestroom suite into the former ground floor. We shaped the garden along the perimeter up to the opposite slope and raised it onto the bedrooms level. This way, we were able to realise a paradox that each habitable room has an entry into the garden, although the house is two-storied. The shaping of the garden facilitated another paradox: the relation to nature was reinforced, and privacy also strengthened at the same time. While the ground floor was stylised and hidden into a sort of a flooded quarry, the bedroom storey looks like a glazed pavilion veiled with cedar lamellas when needed. The retaining walls in the garden are stacked slate. The garden connected to the surrounding pine woods were designed in the vein of the Scandinavian biotope.