Hasta La Ideas

Spanish architects Josemaria de Churtichaga and Cayetana de la Quadra-Salcedo have built themselves a rural retreat with wooden walls, projecting terraces, and a brilliant yellow door and chimney (+ slideshow).

Churtichaga + Quadra-Salcedo designed Four Seasons House for a gently sloping meadow approximately 100 kilometres north of Madrid, which had sat dormant since the architects purchased it 12 years earlier.

“After 12 years of contemplation, we decided to build a tiny house there, a refuge, a piece of landscape as a frame, a small inhabited threshold with two views, east and west,” they explained.

The architects developed the design around a yellow colour palette in response to the hues of flowers, leaves, bark and lichen that they’ve spotted in the landscape across the changing seasons.

“This is a humanised landscape of meadows, walls, ash, streams – a small-scale landscape, minimal, almost domestic, and where absolutely everything happens in yellow,” they said.

Part-buried in the hillside, the two-storey house was built from chunky wooden beams that slot around one another to create alternating corner joints.

The family living room sits at the centre of the upper-ground floor and opens out to terraces on two sides. The first cantilevers out to face distant mountains to the east, while the second projects westward towards a landscape of rocks and brambles.

Timber-lined bedrooms and study areas are located at the two ends and feature built-in desks and cupboards.

Wooden stairs lead down to the partially submerged lower floor, where an open-plan layout creates a space that can be used as a separate guesthouse.

Photography is by Fernando Guerra.

Here’s a project description from Churtichaga + Quadra-Salcedo:

Four Seasons House

This is a humanised landscape of meadows, walls, ash, streams, a small-scale landscape, minimal, almost domestic, and where absolutely everything happens in yellow.

In spring poke all yellow flowers. In the summer, yellow cereal is yellow harvested in a yellow Castilian heat. Fall only comes here in yellow, millions of tiny ash leaves that die in a lingering and dry yellow. In winter, yellow insists in glowing flashes of yellow lichen on the gray trunks of ash trees. And here every machine is yellow, the signs are yellow, everywhere yellows…

We bought a meadow in this landscape 15 years ago, and after 12 years of yellow contemplation, we decided to build a tiny house there, a refuge, a piece of landscape as a frame, a small inhabited threshold with two views, east and west.

To the west, a nearby view of rocks, moss, brambles and ancient ash. And to the east, the distant dawn over the yellow mountains.

This double view and the thinking body finished to draw the house. Everything is small, everything is short, everything has a tiny scale. From outside, the view slides over the house.

The eye only stops at a yellow gate guarding the doorway, and a yellow chimney that warms it, the rest is invisible. And when sitting, stopping in the doorway, the house disappears and the world continues in yellow.

Location: Berrocal, Segovia, Castilla y León (España)
Architects: Josemaria de Churtichaga, Cayetana de la Quadra-Salcedo
Collaborator: Nathanael Lopez
Contractor: Pablo Campoverde
Area: 150 sqm

The post Churtichaga + Quadra-Salcedo built their
Four Seasons House in an idyllic meadow appeared first on Dezeen.

The wooden base of this sofa by Swedish firm Note Design Studio extends outwards to become a side table.

The low table was formed by continuing the ash wood platform out from one end of the sofa, which is part of Note‘s Rise collection designed for Swedish furniture brand Fogia.

“The integrated side table becomes a bridge between the piece of furniture and the rest of the room,” said the designers. “A surface for a still life, a favourite book, plants or whatever you choose to have close at hand.”

Rounded soft cushions covered in quilted upholstery sit on top of the base. The collection is named Rise because the seat backs are shaped to resemble the sun coming up over the horizon.

Note created the range for use in both domestic and commercial settings. The high back is designed to shield the sitters from an open-plan office space that could be situated behind.

“It’s a sofa with is own expression,” Note’s Cristiano Pigazzini told Dezeen. “We got inspired by the shape of the rising sun to create a piece of furniture that stand alone, a elegant centrepiece for both home and public spaces.”

The sofas are available with or without arms, and the range also includes a footstool with a matching base and fabric.

The series will be on show at the Stockholm Furniture and Lighting Fair and Note’s open exhibition at the Old Luma Factory during Stockholm Design Week, which starts on Monday.

Photographs are by Mathias Nero.

The post Side table extends from base of
Rise sofa by Note Design Studio appeared first on Dezeen.

The time has come: It’s your last chance to enter the Core77 Design Awards and snag a 20% submission discount. Enter your design before 5pm EST on Thursday, January 30th and get in on the money-saving action. Don’t worry procrastinators, you’ve still got until March 20th to get your entry in.

If you’ve started to submit your project but need an extra kick of motivation, read up on what three Earlybird honorees (Plinko Poetry Machine, ROLF Spectacles and JACK) have been up to since winning in 2013. They did it and so can you.

Get more information and enter here.

(more…)

After spotting the photo below (which is one of those endlessly, shamelessly Pinterested-shots with no attribution, making tracking down the original creator impossible), Nagoya-based Tori Sugimura figured he’d try making a traditional Japanese version.

After successfully learning to craft his tiny power-outlet-covering sliding shoji screen doors, he caught the attention of a Japanese television show; the original clip is here, for Japanese speakers. Interest in Sugimura’s wares subsequently exploded, and they’re for sale on his Tori Craft website.

(more…)

We recently had the incredibly exciting opportunity to join Land Rover on their latest Driven Challenge; a time-crunching race across the Empty Quarter in Saudi Arabia—one of the harshest…

Continue Reading…