Hasta La Ideas

This house in the Swedish seaside town of Mölle by Stockholm studio Elding Oscarson has an upper storey clad with roughly sawn Douglas fir and a lower section that is entirely transparent (+ slideshow).

When developing the design for the Mölle house, architects Jonas Elding and Johan Oscarson set out to reestablish the architectural experimentation they say dominated the town at the turn of the last century.

“Experimentation has been overpowered by conservation,” said the architects. “Our ambition has been to recover Mölle’s dormant architectural tradition, extrapolating it into the twenty-first century, while providing a house for generations to come.”

Referencing the nearby Villa Italienborg, which features a striking chequerboard facade, the designers chose oversized planks of Douglas fir to create a cladding unlike any other in the town.

These horizontal boards wrap all the way around the building, punctured at intervals by an assortment of square and rectangular windows.

To contrast, the ground floor level features floor-to-ceiling windows with slender frames, offering residents uninterrupted views towards the surrounding garden and coastline beyond.

“The building expresses both contrast and tenderness in relation to site and context,” said Elding and Oscarson.

The house has three storeys – two above ground and one below. Three wings make up the plan, framing a pair of garden terraces and a driveway at the building’s entrance.

Living, dining and kitchen spaces occupy the entire ground floor. All furniture is free-standing so as not to obstruct views through the glass walls, and includes a kitchen island. Heating is provided by a wood-burning stove in the middle of the space.

A spiral staircase leads to floors both above and below. Upstairs, three bedrooms are arranged around an extra lounge, while the basement accommodates a fourth bedroom and a sauna.

Photography is by Åke E:son Lindman.

Here’s a project description from Elding Oscarson:

Mölle by the Sea

Mölle is an extreme location with regards to topography and landscape, as well as history and aura. Around the turn of the century 1900, Northern Europeans were migrating to “Sinful Mölle” – where men and women were allowed to enjoy each other’s company at the same beach – leaving a trace of eccentric and experimental architecture from the first half of the 20th century.

However, from that point in time and onwards, experimentation has been overpowered by conservation. Our shared ambition with our client has been to recover Mölle’s dormant architectural tradition, extrapolating it into the 21st century, while providing a house for generations to come suited an open-minded family, presently with one child.

The building expresses both contrast and tenderness in relation to site and context. Its volume has been kept low, without any plinth or pitched roof. Facing Öresund, the terraced site has an ocean view, but the building questions the convention to turn all rooms towards that same view – the site has many qualities all around, with stone and brick walls, vegetation, and an old ice cellar semi-submerged into a hill.

The building’s shape divides the site into different exterior spaces and provides a softly divided sequence to the interior. Not immediately perceptible, the graphic form of the plan results in a building volume that rather reads as a fragmentised whole – from some angles striking, from other angles neat.

On the ground floor, a pilotis space wrapped in low iron glass, with sliding doors and undivided panes of up to almost 7 metres wide, the garden and its stone walls frame the interior space. The upper volume is resting on a slender steel structure in an abrupt collision between glass and saw finish douglas planks in jumbo format – a facade which is the first of its kind, just like Mölle’s most famous house “Villa Italienborg”, with its chess-board ethernite shingles facade, was back in the days.

Architect: Elding Oscarson
Project team: Jonas Elding, Johan Oscarson, Yuko Maki, Gustaf Karlsson
Textile: Akane Moriyama
Location: Mölle, Sweden
Client: Private
Area: 300 sqm

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seaside house in Mölle appeared first on Dezeen.

This wooden holiday house by Swedish studio Strömma Projekt Max Holst Arkitektkontor is perched on the edge of a gorge in Vindö, an island on the Stockholm archipelago (+ slideshow).

Strömma Projekt Max Holst Arkitektkontor designed the single-storey house on a series of black concrete plinths, elevating it above the gorge so that surrounding trees appear at eye level from the windows.

The dark timber exterior is surrounded by a sheltered deck, leading into a combined kitchen, living and dining room, while two children’s bedrooms are connected to a playroom and sit adjacent to a bathroom and sauna.

Large windows offer views out into the woodland from all four sides of the house, while wooden ceiling beams are left exposed beneath the gabled rooftops.

Timber lines the walls, ceilings and floors throughout the house, complemented by wooden furniture and kitchen units.

“The material palette is simple and essentially rooted in local building traditions,” said the architects.

Wooden steps lead down to an exposed deck beneath the main house, then onwards to a small shed stacked with firewood at the end of a narrow walkway.

Other holiday homes we’ve featured include a cluster of holiday apartments around terraces connected by small alleys, a tiny wooden cabin containing a sauna and bedroom and a riverside house raised on tree trunks to prevent flooding.

See more holiday homes »
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Photography is by Hannes Söderlund.

Here’s some information from the architects:

Holiday house Vindö

The site is located on Vindö, an island in the Stockholm archipelago, Sweden. Upon first glance the site appears a fairly typical archipelago plot with granite outcrops, pine trees and blueberry bushes but soon reveals it’s unusual dramatic topography presenting an exciting opportunity to the architect Max Holst as well as for the developer Strömma Projekt.

The building stands on a ridge bordering a 10 m deep drop into a gorge. In which a number of magnificent trees, mostly pine but also some hardwood grow. On the sheltered terrace and in the house one finds the tops of these trees at eye level.

The orientation of the ridge dictates the building’s form and the spatial subdivisions and the spatial emphasis is on the large living, dining and kitchen space, which leads onto to a large sheltered terrace towards south/east.

Children’s bedrooms are of a modest scale with a master bedroom located to the east. As a buffer between the living and sleeping areas, a bathroom and is located.

The hallway acts as a spacious playroom to the neighbouring the children’s rooms. The material palette is simple and essentially rooted in local building traditions.

Tectonically, the house is composed on black concrete plinths and exposed timber rafters highlight the repetition of a 120mm module on which the construction is based. The only setback from this strict systematisation occurs in the bathroom where the room is simply not suited for these measurements.

Room dimensions fell easily into place, becoming an exercise in creating dynamic spaces with a constant connection to the sky and surrounding forest, all within this framework.

The post Holiday House Vindö by
Max Holst Arkitektkontor appeared first on Dezeen.

A row of raw concrete gables give a zig-zagging profile to this summer house by Swedish studio Tham & Videgård Arkitekter on an island in the Stockholm archipelago (+ slideshow).

Oriented towards the bay, the wide and shallow house was designed by Tham & Videgård Arkitekter to stretch across its site like a line of boathouses, creating five pitched rooftops with varying proportions.

One of the middle gables comprises a glass canopy, sheltering a terrace that splits the building into two separate volumes. This space functions as the houses’s entrance and offers an aperture from the edge of the forest towards the seafront.

Rather than following the timber-clad aesthetic shared by many of the archipelago’s houses, architects Bolle Tham and Martin Videgård chose a plain concrete construction with seamless eaves and minimal detailing.

“The client’s desire for a maintenance-free house inspired us to search for a way to design the house as an integral part of nature, where the material’s weight and colour scale connects to the archipelago granite bedrock, rather than a light wooden cottage,” they explained.

The concrete was cast against plywood boards, giving a subtle grain texture to the surface. This is complemented by ash window frames and wooden furniture.

The largest of the two volumes accommodates a living and dining room that spans three of the gables.

Wooden doors slide open to reveal additional rooms behind, including three bedrooms, a bathroom and a kitchen. Ceilings inside some of the rooms are shaped into gables, extended from the main roofline, and many feature opening skylights.

The smaller second volumes contains a guest bedroom and bathroom, with an outdoor swimming pool just beyond. There’s also a concrete sauna located closer to the coastline.

Tham & Videgård Arkitekter is based in Stockholm. Other residences completed by the studio include an apartment with a colour scheme based on changing seasons and a hotel suite inside a mirror-clad treehouse.

See more architecture by Tham & Videgård Arkitekter »
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Photography is by Åke E:son Lindman.

Here’s a project description from Tham & Videgård Arkitekter:

Summerhouse Lagnö

The setting is the Stockholm archipelago, natural ground sloping gently down to the sea in the south, mostly open with a few trees and bushes. Unlike other projects we worked on located on more isolated islands in the archipelago without car access from the mainland, this site was relatively easy to reach also with heavy transports. This, together with the client’s desire for a maintenance-free house inspired us to search for a way to design the house as an integral part of nature, where the material’s weight and colour scale connects to the archipelago granite bedrock, rather than a light wooden cottage. The two building volumes are placed side by side and form a line that clarifies their position in the landscape, just at the border where the forest opens up out onto the bay. When approached from the north, the entrance presents itself as an opening between the buildings giving direction towards the light and water. It is a first outdoor space protected from rain by a pitched canopy of glass.

The exterior character of the house is derived from a number of transverse gable roofs, which connect to each other, and like boathouses in a line form a pleated long facade. This provides a sequence of varied room heights for the interior and create places in the otherwise completely open living room that stretches through the entire length of the main building. With a relatively shallow room depth and a continuous sliding glass partition out to the terrace, the space can be described as a niche in relation to the archipelago landscape outside. The small rooms are located along the north façade with access through a wall of sliding doors. They are lit by openable skylights and form smaller pitched ceiling spaces within the main roof volume.

Terrace, interior floors and facades are made of exposed natural coloured in situ cast concrete with plywood formwork. The interior is painted white with woodworks in ash. A sauna, a detached block of in situ cast concrete with a wooden interior, offers a secluded place near the beach and pier.

Architects: Tham & Videgård Arkitekter
Team: Bolle Tham and Martin Videgård, (chief architects), Anna Jacobson (project architect)
Interior: Tham & Videgård Arkitekter
Landscape design: Tham & Videgård Arkitekter
Structural engineer: Sweco, Mathias Karlsson
Built area: 140 sqm
Project: 2010
Completion: 2012

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Tham & Videgård Arkitekter appeared first on Dezeen.

Black-painted pine clads the walls of this small gabled house by Swedish studio Erik Andersson Architects on an island in the Stockholm archipelago (+ slideshow).

The single-storey house is covered with a traditional Falu Rödfärg paint to give it an austere appearance, while the symmetrical roof is clad with black tar paper to match.

Erik Andersson Architects used an exact 1:3 proportion to generate the dimensions of the building, creating a six-metre height, a six-metre width and an 18-metre length.

Located in a woodland area on the island of Yxlan, the building is constructed over a wooden podium that creates a continuous deck around its perimeter. This allow residents to sit in the sun at any time of day.

Large square windows meet the ground on each elevation so that different rooms can be opened out to the deck.

Contrasting with the exterior, most rooms inside the house have white-painted walls, floors and ceilings. The bathroom is the only exception and is lined with square black tiles.

A living and dining room occupies the central section of the house. A double bedroom sits on one side, while a bathroom, a single bedroom and a sauna are positioned at the opposite end.

The house also features an outdoor plunge pool, which can be heated using a wood-burning stove.

Stockholm firm Erik Andersson Architects also recently completed a pedestrian bridge with a built-in heating system to keep it clear of ice and snow.

See more houses in Sweden on Dezeen, including one with a glass-fronted lookout loft and one with an aquarium-like swimming pool.

Photography is by Åke E-son Lindman.

Here’s some more information from Erik Andersson Architects:

Strict proportions by Erik Andersson

On Yxlan in the northern Stockholm archipelago, Erik Andersson Architects has designed the archetypal house. Designed strictly by using the proportional ratio of 1:3, the house measures six meters in depth, eighteen meters in length and six meters in height.

The facade windows also follow a clear pattern: they are all square in form and have the same size. The villa is situated on natural ground, surrounded by pine trees and spruces, and much of the surroundings have been preserved. A terrace runs around the building, making it possible for the residents to lounge and enjoy the sun at any time of the day.

Glass panels on both sides open views right through the house and provide a constant contact with the sea. The house is clad with horizontal pine panels, painted black with Falu Rödfärg – a traditional Swedish paint that can be traced right back to the 16th century – while the roof is covered with tar felt.

As a contrast to the black exterior, the interior is dominated by white. Everything from the walls and pine floors is painted white – except for the bathroom, where black tiles cover everything from the walls to the floor, and a window, high up in the ceiling, provides a glimpse of the sky.

The house also features a sauna with a panoramic view to the sea and the cruise ships passing by, as well as a custom made outdoor plunge pool, which can be heated for winter use with a wood-fired stove.

Project name: Villa Wallin
Type: Private Residence
Location: Yxlan, Stockholm archepelago, Sweden
Status: Completed
Client: Mats Wallin and Petra Ryrberg
Architect: Erik Andersson Architects
Budget: EUR 150.000
Size: 108m.

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Erik Andersson Architects appeared first on Dezeen.