Hasta La Ideas

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.

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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.

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Max Holst Arkitektkontor appeared first on Dezeen.

This tiny wooden cabin in Sweden contains a sauna and a bedroom with large picture windows that frame views of the surrounding forest (+ slideshow).

The cabin was designed by Paris studio SEPTEMBRE for a couple who spend their summers on the remote island of Trossö, off the west coast of Sweden.

It is situated in a clearing just 50 metres from the the North Sea and the architects told Dezeen that their brief was for “a room with a view of the sea,” that gives “the feeling of being immersed in the landscape”.

The clients also asked that the building “make minimal impact on the surounding nature [so] no trees should be cut down.”

The cabin is raised off the ground so it sits lightly on the plot and all of the materials used were transported to the site by boat as there are no roads on the island.

A pitched roof references the vernacular of local fishing huts and also increases the internal volume.

External walls are made from Swedish spruce that has been painted black. The floorboards are also spruce, while the internal walls and ceiling are clad in plywood.

A large sliding door leads from a small deck into the bedroom. With the door open, the deck effectively doubles the usable floor space.

In the bedroom, a mattress is placed at the back of a wooden platform that also acts as a surface for seating.

Long drawers on castors roll out from underneath the platform to provide storage.

The sauna is entered through a door at the side of the cabin and contains benches and a window looking out onto the forest.

Renzo Piano recently completed a tiny cabin designed as a self-sufficient hideaway for a single inhabitant at the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany, while other wooden cabins on Dezeen include an artists’ cabin built on the side of a hill in Nova Scotia and a wood-clad two-storey cabin in Austria.

We’ve published some unusual saunas on Dezeen, including one with wings like a bird and another that’s hung from a bridge – see more stories about saunas.

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by SEPTEMBRE 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.

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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.

This slatted structure by architects Plasma Studio looks like it’s crawling over an apartment building in the Italian Dolomites (+ slideshow).

Plasma Studio were faced with the dual tasks of adding a circulation space and a new family home to an existing block in the South Tyrol village of Sesto, close to the Austrian border.

“An under-utilised roof space gave way to an angular crown, connected to a ground floor reception space and architectural office by the host’s renovated spine,” said the architects.

Parametric software created an angular shape that folds around and on top of the original cuboid form, covered by thin strips of larch wood similar to the Strata Hotel the studio designed just down the valley.

The structure appears to grow out of the hillside, snaking up the back of the building as a series of faceted planes.

Two levels are housed inside the extension, which uses the sloping site so the lower floor nestles against the top floor existing building but opens out onto a garden on the same level behind.

Inside, bedrooms face on to a corridor lit by a glass chasm that extends up and over the building.

An open-plan living, kitchen and dining area are housed in the upper storey, which sits at a slight angle to the structure below to further differentiate it.

The large balcony on this level looks out to the forested hills and snow-capped peaks on the other side of the valley.

These two floors are linked by internal and external staircases, and also connect to the circulation core that provides access to each of the six apartments in the whitewashed building underneath.

Plasma Studio has also designed an apartment block with jagged copper balconies and angular LED street lamps.

More houses set in the rugged Italian landscape include a gabled home with stripy wooden walls and a holiday retreat that incorporates an enormous window frame into a reconstructed stone wall.

Photography is by Hertha Hurnaus.

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The architects sent us the project description below:

Paramount Residence Alma

This project was conceived to fulfil a two-part problematic: (1) Residence Alma -a Tyrolean guest house with 6 holiday apartments from the 1960s adorned with a pitched roof – was due for a common circulation and service core, and (2) the project architect, Ulla Hell, was looking for a new home for her young family of five in the mountain community of Sesto. The result: an under-utilised roof space gave way to an angular crown, connected to a ground floor reception space and architectural office by the host’s renovated spine.

Having already made their mark on nearby Residence Königswarte with the addition of the Strata Hotel in 2007, Plasma Studio sought to follow a similar skin organization. A timber strip section in larch wood was borrowed from the neighbouring Strata and extruded along two paths. The first stretches across the site, picking up the topography on either end of the building and climbing to enclose a third storey balcony. Here, the edge skirts around the existing footprint, leaving corners exposed to acknowledge its presence.

A second path draws the timber skin up from behind, folding around the chimney to return to the ground. Interstitial spaces between the exterior walls and wooden bands swell at ground level to offer sheltered outdoor living spaces. The design team employed parametric modelling software to optimize the density of these timber strips and their metal substrustructure, balancing budget, aesthetics, privacy and views. This approach allowed for flexibility throughout the design phase and output shop drawings for pre-fabricated elements at an efficient pace.

The Alma addition departs, however, from the Strata in its approach to volume. The practical constraints of a multi-room hotel structure called for a regular distribution of modules along a connecting spine. The perceived volume was achieved through horizontal sections around free-flowing terrace spaces. With the Alma, we took advantage of a more flexible program to create unique spatial conditions. These interior volumes are rendered legible from the exterior by the timber strips–an honest depiction of the playful activity within.

The interior of this family home is characterized by 360-degree views. Perhaps the most spectacular of these being a view of the sky through an incision over the central stair. This opening delivers an immediate reading of exterior weather conditions, collecting precipitation and receiving direct sunlight.

The main living spaces are split over two floors with first floor bedrooms off a skylit corridor, and an open plan kitchen, dining and family room encircling a fireplace on the second floor. By grouping functional elements in orthogonal cores, the surrounding space is liberated. The exterior walls of the main living spaces collapse inwards to catch light, views and varying degrees of enclosure.

All living spaces in the private residence have direct access to the outside through a series terraces or gardens. Its multiple access points include: a main entrance through an internal connection to the neighbouring house, a series of openings that follow the natural topography, and an external stair connecting the third floor terrace to the garden. Each inhabitant has come to find their own favourite route.

Limited material and colour palettes give strength to the space, with splashes of colour in the children’s washroom. The otherwise white walls provide a backdrop for an ever-changing display of shadows from the pleated roof above.

As the extension sits within the steep topography, substructural elements were developed in reinforced concrete, while the superstructure was built from prefabricated cross laminated timber (CLT) insulated with wood fiber and sealed with black bitumen. The outer skin in larch wood strips on a galvanized steel structure was determined according to cost and aesthetics by the aforementioned parametric model. A consistently limited colour code was applied to the exterior, allowing the volume to dissolve into the surrounding hillside when viewed from afar.

Through its use of form, materials and views, this newly completed addition flirts with its context at three scales. The first, and most immediate, with its host: as an addition to the Alma residence, it shares a newly renovated core, carrying the fractal geometry from the roof down to Plasma’s Italian office through the Alma’s cartesian skeleton. The second, with its neighbour: together the Strata and the Alma define the next generation of the family-owned hotel complex. And finally, with its terrain: the sculptural addition acts, not as a parasite, but as a mediator between the existing house and surrounding topography, extending from the landscape like a lichen.

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by Plasma Studio appeared first on Dezeen.

A contemporary house inserted behind the crumbling walls of a ruined twelfth-century castle in Warwickshire, England, by Witherford Watson Mann is one of the six projects nominated for the 2013 Stirling Prize (+ slideshow).

The mediaeval Astley Castle was once the home of an aristocratic English family, but has stood as a ruin since the 1970s, when a devastating fire wiped out the hotel that occupied the building at that time.

Without a budget to restore the building, architectural charity The Landmark Trust launched a competition for the design of a holiday house that could be created within the decaying structure and announced London studio Witherford Watson Mann as the winner in 2007.

The architects designed a two-storey residence that would squat within the building’s chunky sandstone walls. Clay brickwork was used to infill gaps in the structure, creating a visible contrast between the new and old structures.

Laminated wooden beams form a new system of floors and ceilings, creating living areas and bedrooms in the oldest part of the castle.

The wooden roof also stretches over extensions added in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, but instead of blanketing these spaces it simply forms a hollow canopy, creating entrance courtyards that are exposed to the rain.

Four bedrooms, with space to sleep eight people, occupy the lower level of the house. An oak staircase leads up to the first-floor living room, where the architects have increased natural light by adding two new windows.

Astley Castle is one of six projects shortlisted for the Stirling Prize, which is awarded to the building that has made the greatest contribution to British architecture in the past year. Other projects nominated include an elliptical chapel and a museum that mimics volcanic formations.

Other castle renovations on Dezeen include one converted into a mountain museum and one used as an art gallery. See more castles on Dezeen »

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by Witherford Watson Mann appeared first on Dezeen.