Hasta La Ideas

DMOA Architecten has transformed a former hunting lodge in Belgium into a family home, retaining the eight piers of its original brick facade as a garden feature (+ movie).

La Branche was first built in the eighteenth century on the site of a castle in the woods of Heverlee, Belgium. Originally a home, it later became a hunting lodge but was left vacant 15 years ago.

DMOA Architecten refurbished two brick blocks and created a new one-storey volume that links the two. The eight piers of the original facade, which gave its name to the property, were retained as a free-standing screen in front.

“When you walk through the house you feel continuously that you are in a nexus between old and new,” said Luis Querol of DMOA Architecten.

The new flat-roofed single-storey volume holds the living and dining areas. It has custom-made windows and timber cladding in black-tinted afzelia.

Cupboards are made of smoked oak veneer, the floor is natural oak, and the kitchen is a combination of brown Corian and smoked oak veneer.

The new addition makes a U-shaped plan, connecting with the two brick gabled buildings that sit at right angles to it to form a central courtyard.

The house is now home to a family with four children, whose bedrooms are within the brick-built wings.

Floors and walls in the master bathroom are painted black.

Photography by Thomas Janssens. Video is by Luis Querol.

Here’s a project description the architect sent us:

La Branche

The project is a peaceful combination of old and new. The new part is a sober black canvas looking at the garden from behind the old walls.

In several places remnant parts of the old walls are kept as garden elements, an aspect that strengthens the atmosphere. When you walk through the house you feel continuously that you are in a nexus between old and new.

The project consists of the renovation of an old resting place for hunters in the woods of Heverlee (Belgium), transforming it in an comfortable and modern dwelling for a family with four children.

One of the three wings of the U-compositions was removed except of the facade wall, which remains with the name that gave title to the old refuge and now to its renovation “La Branche”.

The sides made of brick contain the private rooms of the family meanwhile the dark volume accommodate the living and the kitchen in permanent connection with the pool and the outside garden. The dark colours of the interior design contrast with the high brightness that gets inside through the large windows.

Project Title: La Branche
Architects: DMOA Architecten
Collaborators: Benjamin Denef, Charlotte Gryspeerdt, Matthias Mattelaer; Lien Gesquiere
Localization: Heverlee, Belgium
Site area: 2200 sqm
Floor area: 655 sqm

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hunting lodge by DMOA Architecten appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: property developer Craig Robins discusses his role in transforming Miami’s South Beach from a rundown retirement village into a glamorous holiday destination in this movie filmed during Design Miami last year.

Craig Robins, CEO of property development company Dacra, was born in Miami and started acquiring properties in South Beach in the 1980s while still studying law at university.

“We had the largest collection of historical Art Deco structures in the same place in the world,” he says of South Beach. “It was very rundown: it had become a retirement village for an elderly population that was dying off and there was a crack epidemic. There were a lot of people that thought the buildings should be torn down.”

He continues: “There was a group of us that thought that, not only should they be preserved, but that they could really become this incredible legacy that Miami could offer to the world. So I began my career figuring out how to adaptively reuse these great historical structures.”

This was an unusual approach to property development in America at the time, Robins claims.

“[South Beach has] much more of a European feel,” he explains. “The structures are smaller, the neighbourhood is pedestrian-friendly, which in Miami is almost non-existent.”

Many of the Art Deco hotels along South Beach’s iconic Ocean Drive and the surrounding area were refurbished by Robins together with Island Records founder Chris Blackwell in the 1990s.

“Chris had sold Island and wanted to begin doing hotels,” Robins explains. “He and I did a lot of investing in the South Beach area together. From Chris I learned to produce creativity, because he was approaching real estate much more like a guy who made records, who worked with artists and ended up with a great creative product. That was the way we approached the buildings we were doing, and that’s still true for me today.”

Many of the buildings that Robins and Blackwell bought and renovated were quickly sold on again.

“Part of what we realised was that sometimes it was better for someone else to own a property so that the neighbourhood had this collaborative, competitive spirit where everybody was expressing themselves in their own way,” he says. “Gloria and Emilio Estefan bought the Cardozo from us very early on and did a beautiful job with it.”

He concludes: “It’s kind of the opposite to what Disney World does. The whole idea about Disney World is to give you a fantasy with something that’s fake. Our business model is to do something that’s real.”

We drove around South Beach in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Jewels by Zequals. You can listen to the full track on Dezeen Music Project.

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Deco buildings “should be torn down” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: French botanist Patrick Blanc, the inventor of green walls, explains how he created the hanging gardens on the outside of Herzog & de Meuron‘s new Pérez Art Museum in our next movie from Miami.

The new Pérez Art Museum Miami by Herzog & de Meuron, which opened last month, features clusters of columns covered with plants suspended from the building’s large overhanging roof.

Blanc explains that the Swiss architects approached him to create these vertical gardens after they successfully worked together on the CaixaForum arts centre in Madrid, completed in 2008.

“We had already covered a wall totally with plants in Madrid,” says Blanc. “Here, for the museum, they asked me: ‘Do you think it’s possible to have the plants on columns instead?’ I said: ‘Yes, of course.'”

Unlike a green wall, which faces in one direction, Blanc had to use different types of plants on each side of the hanging columns.

“For the outside surface, facing the sea, [the plants] have to face full sun, they have to face strong winds, sometimes salt and sometimes hurricanes,” he says. “The side facing the museum is very dark, so [I used] shade-loving plants.”

Blanc claims the key to creating a successful vertical garden is the diversity of species used.

“I use many, many different species,” he explains. “Here, in Miami, I used 80 different species. Sometimes, I use up to 400. When you have so many species, it looks much more natural.”

Vertical gardens are more than just aesthetically pleasing, Blanc goes on to claim.

“Because the roots are growing on the surface, [rather than into the ground], all of the micro-organisms associated with the roots are totally in contact with the air, [which is important] for de-pollution,” he says, “Also, you have benefits of insulation.”

He continues: “And, of course, the target it to use water collected from the roof. With a horizontal garden you lose a lot of water through percolation in the soil. You only have useful water when you have a vertical garden.”

Blanc believes that vertical gardens have become so popular because they provide an interesting and space-efficient way of introducing greenery into cities and claims he doesn’t mind that so many other people have taken on his idea.

“You use vertical space and usually it is empty space,” he says. “I think that is why they have been such a big success.” “Everybody in the world is doing vertical gardens. Of course, 20-25 years ago, I was the only one. But I am happy because with this idea I created a new vision of the interaction between human beings, the town and plants.”

We drove around Miami in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Jewels by Zequals. You can listen to the full track on Dezeen Music Project.

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Pérez Art Museum create “living walls” appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: Jacques Herzog of Herzog & de Meuron explains how the Pérez Art Museum Miami was designed so that everything is visible and there is no strict barrier between inside and outside, in our second movie from Miami.

“The building is a naked structure; everything you see is at the same time carrying, so structural, and space-making, so spaces defining and containing,” Herzog tells Dezeen.

“There is no inside/outside, there is nothing that is masked, so everything you get is doing all you expect from architecture. In that sense it’s a very honest or very archaic architecture.”

Herzog & de Meuron‘s Pérez Art Museum Miami opened to the public last week in downtown Miami and accommodates 3000 square-metres of galleries within a three-storey complex with a huge elevated veranda.

A car park is on show beneath the building, while a single roof shelters both indoor and outdoor spaces.

“Typologically you could say that this is a building built on stilts,” says the architect. “Layers end with a trellis-like roof and start with a platform which is also kind of a trellis, under which you can park your car and that also is open to the elements. Literally everything is visible, is part of the whole.”

The architect describes how galleries were designed to open out to the veranda so that “landscape would walk inside the building”.

“We wanted to do buildings that are transparent or permeable, so that inside/outside would not be a strict barrier,” he explains.

Exhibition galleries occupy the two lower floors of the museum and were organised to encourage a fluid transition between spaces.

“The special concept of the museum is this kind of sequence of spaces, which are more fluid,” says Herzog. “It’s a new kind of museum typology, which we believe was right to do here.”

The building also features an auditorium that doubles up as a connecting staircase.

“The auditorium staircase is an attempt to do more than just an auditorium – that would be a space that is closed and only used when there is a performance or conference – but to introduce it so that you have a grand stair leading people up to the main gallery floor,” says the architect.

He continues: “By means of curtains it can be subdivided, so it gives more opportunities to the curators and directors, and the people here.”

Bay windows puncture the walls of the first-floor galleries and contain benches that visitors can use to take a break from exhibitions.

“This is to give the windows more than just the role of being a hole in the facade,” adds Herzog. “This again is a transitional element between inside and outside, inviting people to rest, sit and warm up a little bit.”

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Museum “is a naked structure” appeared first on Dezeen.

Angular zinc-clad volumes fold around a central courtyard and stretch out towards ocean views at this house designed by Australian architect John Wardle on the scenic Great Ocean Road in Victoria (+ movie).

Named Fairhaven Beach House, the three-storey residence is perched on the top of a hill. John Wardle Architects laid out the building with an uneven U-shaped plan to create a wall of windows facing the water and an east-facing courtyard that is protected from coastal winds.

The route from the entrance to a large living room was intended as a dramatic progression through the building, passing by a cantilevered study and through a pivoting asymmetric door.

“It is a dynamic, fluid journey through the house from arrival to the ocean view,” said the architects, whose past projects include a house on a working sheep farm in Tasmania.

“It is choreographed to increase anticipation before reaching the main living space,” they added.

A large kitchen and dining room is positioned on one side and projects even further towards the coastline, plus a secluded balcony provides an opportunity to dine outdoors.

“The house is carefully zoned to allow for privacy and communal gathering,” said the architects.

While the exterior of the house is clad with grey zinc panels to blend in with the tones of the bush landscape, the interior features timber surfaces across every wall, floor and ceiling.

Two bedrooms are located on the ground floor and a wooden staircase leads up to a third on the upper storey.

A garage, wine cellar and informal living room are tucked away in the basement.

Fairhaven Beach House topped the residential category at the Australian National Architecture Awards earlier this month. Judges described it as “a masterful control of form and space, scale, material and detail”.

Photography is by Trevor Mein. Movie is by Maximilian Mein.

Here’s more information from John Wardle Architects:

Fairhaven Residence

The Fairhaven Beach House is located on top of the ridgeline above the Great Ocean Road on the Victorian coastline. The site enjoys panoramic views over the southern ocean and surf beach below.

The proportions, orientation and dimensions of windows have been tailored to particular views and to reveal internal spaces. The design process has been one akin to scenography, bringing together sensory and spatial experiences to frame the theatre of inhabitation within.

This beach house coils and steps around a protected central courtyard, which creates an outdoor space sheltered from the harsh prevailing winds. The living area doors and an oversized sliding kitchen window open up and integrate the courtyard with the house during fine weather.

It is a dynamic, fluid journey through the house from arrival to the ocean view; it is choreographed to increase anticipation before reaching the main living space.

As you step beneath a cantilevered study into a dramatic vertical entry space, you become acutely aware of a number of twists and folds along its length that make the transformation into the horizontal living space. Its main window aperture matches the cinematic proportions of the ocean view.

The house is carefully zoned to allow for privacy and communal gathering. The upper level houses a suite of private rooms including a main bedroom, ensuite, study and viewing terrace. The entry level contains a pair of bedrooms and bathroom. The main living and dining space is where the occupants come together. A garage, laundry and informal living space are hidden from view in a basement level.

Materially the house is clad in a green-grey zinc cladding, for both its longevity and natural colouring that merges with the scrub and tea tree landscape. In contrast, the interior of the house is completely lined in timber (floors, walls, cabinetry and ceilings) to form an enclosure for living that its inhabitants become completely immersed within. The eye is then always drawn back to the outlook beyond.

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stretches out towards the ocean appeared first on Dezeen.