Hasta La Ideas

This guest house by American firm Bohlin Cywinski Jackson nestles against a rugged stone wall within a coastal mountain range in California (+ slideshow).

Using a palette of pre-weathered zinc, timber and rough stone, Bohlin Cywinski Jackson designed the Halls Ridge Knoll Guest House to fit in with the ambling terrain – a former cattle ranch with views across the San Clemente Mountains and Los Padres National Forest.

“Designed to choreograph movement along the extraordinary ridge-top site, the guesthouse celebrates its magical surroundings,” say the architects.

The shed-like timber frame of the house angles up from the stone boundary wall to create a single-storey building with floor-to-ceiling glazing stretching across most of its frontage.

A wooden deck wraps around the glazed facade. It leads across to a swimming pool on one side, which stretches out to meet the end of the stone wall along its edge.

The zinc-clad roof overhangs the edge of the terrace to provide shade during the hottest parts of the day.

The largest room in the house is a combined living room and kitchen. Positioned beyond a pair of bedrooms and bathrooms, it features an open fireplace at the base of a stone chimney and wooden flooring reclaimed from an old barn.

Halls Ridge Knoll Guest House is the first of three buildings under construction on the site and will be followed by a workshop and a larger residence nearby.

It was also recently named as one of six winners of the 2013 Housing Awards by the American Institute of Architects.

Bohlin Cywinski Jackson also recently won a competition alongside New York firm SO-IL to design an art museum for the University of California. See more architecture by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson.

Photography is by Nic Lehoux.

Here’s a project description from Bohlin Cywinski Jackson:

Halls Ridge Knoll Guest House Santa Lucia Preserve, Carmel, California

Halls Ridge Knoll Guest House is located in the Santa Lucia Preserve, a remarkably beautiful, vast landscape that was previously a historic cattle ranch. The rugged and pristine site has a rolling topography, a forest of ancient live Oaks and Manzanita, and offers panoramic views of the San Clemente Mountains and the Los Padres National Forest beyond.

The masterplan for this vacation retreat puts forth a series of buildings that relate to its ridge-top setting. These buildings include a workshop, guest house, and main residence, each anchored to the land with a series of massive stone walls and fireplace chimneys, marking the passage along the ridge and culminating in a stone court at the future main residence.

The first building constructed on site is the guesthouse, which flanks the winding entry drive and is anchored to the sloping site with a massive stone wall, screening the house and pool. A simple timber-framed shed roof springs from the stone wall, supporting naturally weathered zinc roofing over cedar-clad volumes.

The guesthouse is sited to take advantage of passive design elements of the temperate California climate. Expansive windows provide natural lighting throughout the house, while a broad overhanging roof shades from the intensity of the summer sun.

Sliding doors and operable hopper windows throughout the house use the prevailing winds for natural ventilation, while also providing expansive views of the mountain range. Wood flooring in the living space of the house is reclaimed from an old barn structure.

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by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson appeared first on Dezeen.

This renovated apartment in Berlin features raw concrete ceilings and floors that combine oak parquet with decorative tiles (+ slideshow).

Local architects Marc Benjamin Drewes and Thomas Schneider teamed up to design the apartment for a couple and their children, creating two bedrooms, a bathroom and an open-plan living room and kitchen.

The project is named Box 117 and the architects refer to the two white-painted bedrooms and bathroom as “simple boxes” with a narrow shadow gap around the tops of the walls to highlight the edges.

The wooden parquet flooring runs down one side of the apartment beneath white-washed timber ceilings. The red and white cement tiles are positioned on the opposite side underneath the exposed concrete ceilings.

“The raw concrete ceilings are preserving the industrial character,” says Drewes. “Partly old with a wooden pattern, partly new with a smooth surface, the ceiling tells something about the history of the space.”

Each room has a floor-to-ceiling height of 3.4 metres, allowing for overhead storage and an elevated sleeping area in the children’s bedroom.

See more apartments on Dezeen, including one in Barcelona with tiled floors that reveal its historic layout and one in Paris with decorative wooden flooring.

Photography is by Christoph Rokitta.

Here’s a project description from Marc Benjamin Drewes:

Box 117

A couple with two little kids moved into this loft in a Berlin backyard.

A continuous space for a kitchen, living area and sleeping area for the parents surrounds two boxes in which you find the children’s room and the bathroom. This open layout creates the loft character of the space.

The children are sleeping in a niche above a litte storage next to the children’s room. That way one takes advantage of the clear height of 3.4m to create more living area. The sleeping area of the parents can be closed with a room-high sliding door. If the door is open it disappears behind the bathroom-box.

The oak parquet and the cement tiles on the floor are creating a basis full of character for the simple boxes with a limewash coat. A shadow gap all around separates these boxes from the existing elements of the space and all doors are flush with the wall to accentuate the simple form. The raw concrete ceilings are preserving the industrial character. Partly old with a wooden pattern, partly new with a smooth surface the ceiling tells something about the history of the space.

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and Thomas Schneider appeared first on Dezeen.

Dutch design office Rietveld Landscape has built an arched foam screen with hundreds of building-shaped holes inside a disused chapel at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht (+ slideshow).

Rietveld Landscape designed the screen as a reversal of its Vacant NL exhibition from the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, where a suspended model city was used to demonstrate the potential of 10,000 vacant government spaces in the Netherlands.

Here, the installation presents the “negative spaces” of the model city and stretches from the floor of the mezzanine all the way up to the ceiling. It will form a backdrop to a changing selection of objects from the museum’s collection of applied arts and design from the last two centuries.

“The blue window literally and figuratively sheds a new light on the space and complements the architecture of this medieval chapel,” says the studio.

The installation is on show at the Centraal Museum until 31 January 2014.

Rietveld Landscape is a design and research office based in Amsterdam. Its other projects include an installation that looked like a burning building and a criss-crossing bridge. See more architecture by Rietveld Landscape.

Photography is by Rob ‘t Hart.

Read on for more information from Rietveld Landscape:

Pretty Vacant

The installation Pretty Vacant by design and research studio Rietveld Landscape encourages visitors to take a fresh look at the empty spaces of the Centraal Museum. The blue window literally and figuratively sheds a new light on the space and complements the architecture of this medieval chapel. The window is based on the ‘negative spaces’ of Rietveld Landscape’s earlier installation Vacant NL, which was the Dutch submission for the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2010. The installation in the Gerrit Rietveld-designed pavilion in Venice showed the enormous potential of 10,000 disused public buildings in the Netherlands from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries.

Rietveld Landscape’s work fits in well with the Centraal Museum aim to acquire work at the intersection of art, design and architecture. Rietveld Landscape is a young studio that represents in an outstanding way the new developments at this intersection. Museum Director Edwin Jacobs described them as “the talents in field of spatial interventions, without equivalent in any existing architectural or theoretical discourse. They are real new-thinkers in images.”

Through the acquisition of this installation by Rietveld Landscape with support from the Mondriaan Fund, the Centraal Museum has realised its ambition of adding Vacant NL to the ‘Collectie Nederland’.

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Rietveld Landscape appeared first on Dezeen.

An elongated timber prow oversails a solid brick base at this school boathouse in Worcester, England, by British studio Associated Architects (+ slideshow).

The Michael Baker Boathouse replaces an existing building that had served as the The King’s School’s boathouse since the 1950s but was too small to accommodate storage for rowing boats and sculls as well as training facilities, changing rooms and events spaces.

Associated Architects redesigned the building as a two-storey structure with a boat-shaped first floor that cantilevers out towards the adjacent River Severn, while the brickwork ground floor protects the interior from the regular flooding that occurs on the site.

The architects used double-length bricks to emphasise the slender form of the boathouse. The timber-clad upper floor features diagonal lengths of sweet chestnut, which will naturally fade to a silvery-grey, and a glazed bow facing out over the water.

“This and the gently curving plan, following [Worcester’s] historic defensive line, give the building a distinctive modern presence on Riverside Walk,” say the architects.

Interior walls are lined with sheets of birch, alongside more exposed brickwork. A skylight spans the roof to bring daylight into the upper floor.

The layout of the new boathouse also creates a new pedestrian route across the neighbouring memorial gardens.

“The scheme creates a new route to the boathouse through the gardens, which is much more direct, wheelchair friendly, and improves security: the previous boathouse was isolated and accessible only from outside the school grounds,” add the architects.

The Michael Baker Boathouse is the latest of several projects by Associated Architects at The King’s School, which include a new library and a sports hall that is still under construction.

Other boathouses on Dezeen include a cylindrical building in Austin and a renovated Victorian boathouse in the south of England.

Photography is by Martine Hamilton Knight.

Here’s some more information from Associated Architects:

The King’s School, Worcester
Michael Baker Boathouse

Associated Architects’ second ten-year Masterplan for King’s Worcester included rebuilding the Boathouse, which was previously a small and unsightly 1950s building. The site is a focal point in the Masterplan, Conservation Area and in the Worcester City Council/Sustrans Worcester Riverside project. On the line of the old city defences, it is at the edge of the historic city core which has a rich history including Norman and medieval archaeology. The Masterplan proposal to create a striking modern building was welcomed by Worcester City Council planners.

The existing ground floor footprint is increased by 60% to provide storage for all the School’s considerable fleet of rowing boats and sculls. The site is subject to regular flooding, so this floor’s construction internally and externally is robust fair-faced brickwork growing out from the line of the historic brick embankment. Reflecting the elongated form of the building, the new wall is built with double-length bricks.

By contrast, the lightweight upper floor floats above the retaining wall and flood plain. It provides changing, teaching and a school/community training and reception space, with dramatic views up and down the River Severn from a new glazed and cantilevered prow. This and the gently curving plan, following the historic defensive line, give the building a distinctive modern presence on Riverside Walk.

The upper floor overlooks the historic Creighton Memorial Gardens, previously an under-used part of the School grounds. The scheme creates a new route to the Boathouse through the Gardens, which is much more direct, wheelchair friendly, and improves security: the previous Boathouse was isolated and accessible only from outside the School grounds. A new garden terrace and windows north focus views to the twin Worcester landmarks of the Cathedral and St Andrew’s spire.

Fine sweet chestnut timber laths cloak the upper volume, weathering down to a natural silvery-grey colour in keeping with the sensitive historic context. Rather than running horizontally, the laths are set at a shallow angle to enhance the dynamic form of the building. The interior is panelled in ice-birch over timber I-beams, facilitating airtight construction and rapid thermal response for multiple uses. The roof is traditional standing seam terne-coated stainless.

Sustainability is a central consideration in the brief and design. Solar electric and hot water roof panels meet much of the building’s energy needs in summer, and make a useful contribution in winter. The construction uses the principles of Passivhaus design with triple glazing, super-insulation and air-tightness. These measures, coupled with a wood-pellet boiler, give environmental performance to EPC A, approaching zero carbon standards.

Contract Value: £1.86M
Cost per sqm: £1772/sqm
Floor area: 772 sqm
Design: 2010
Construction: 2012
Carbon footprint: 9.4 kg CO2 kg/m2/yr

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by Associated Architects appeared first on Dezeen.

A blackened steel counter continues into a mirrored wall in this Aesop skincare shop by Japanese studio Torafu Architects (+ slideshow).

Torafu Architects installed a mirrored wall with a protruding counter in the long narrow shop for hair and skincare brand Aesop in Shibuya, Tokyo.

The dark counter appears to extend into the reflected space, whilst a cubbyhole of products interrupts the mirrored wall.

Narrow windows along the top of the opposite wall were revealed during the renovation process, allowing light to filter down into the slender interior.

Rectangles of brown glass surround the doorway, referencing the trademark brown bottles that line the walls of the store housed in blackened steel shelves.

An elongated demonstration sink sits just inside the entrance, also made from blackened steel, with a mirrored splashback from which simple garden taps protrude.

Reclaimed timber flooring marks the entrance to the shop and the remainder of the space is finished with sisal carpet.

Torafu Architects also designed Aesop’s Shin-Marunouchi store, in which chunky chipboard surfaces have been sanded and stained to look like marble.

Earlier this month we featured Aesop’s East Hampton store which has shelves supported by dowels slotted into pegboard walls.

We also previously interviewed the founder of Aesop, who explained why no two Aesop stores are the same. Read the interview »

See all our stories about Aesop interiors »
See all our stories about shops »

Here’s more information from Torafu:

For Australian skin care brand Aesop, we planned the interior and exterior of the new store on Meiji Street in Shibuya. The store is located on the first floor of a three-storey building situated between two taller buildings; the space is long and slender – 2.6m in width, 7.8m in depth and 3.9m in maximum height. We aimed to work with these proportions to provide a welcoming and intimate space for communication with customers.

The windows on one side wall, which appeared after demolishing of the former store’s interior, were the key for the design. On the wall opposite, we mounted a mirror to enhance scenery, extensity and light. The window located at the front of the store below has brown glass to represent Aesop’s traditional containers, and is incorporated in the shelves. In this way, the window is extended and the shelves are considered as a frame.

In order to limit the variety of the materials used, the shelves and counter are finished in blackened steel, which is also the basis for storage doors assimilated into the mortar wall or mirror wall; the basin that is Aesop’s feature is set near the entrance to effect a good view from the passage.

The door of the entrance and the facade sign are created from glass. The latter is composed of brown glass and corrugated glass, like patchwork – its colour and transparent appearance evoking Aesop’s brand image. A luminous sign on the wall and a selection of plants lend an outdoor atmosphere. As you move further into the interior, the floor texture changes from old wood to sisal carpet, subtly emphasising the transition from the busy street to the quietude of the store.

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by Torafu Architects appeared first on Dezeen.