Hasta La Ideas

Black panels of corrugated iron clad the exterior of this lakeside wooden cabin in rural Victoria, Australia, by local firm Branch Studio Architects (+ slideshow).

Branch Studio Architects originally designed the Pump House to give the clients space for storing a water pump and other equipment needed to maintain their farmland property, but the compact shed also doubles as a quiet lakeside retreat.

“The original brief was for a temporary shed-like space to house the water pump and other farm equipment as well as to provide the owners with somewhere sheltered to have a cup of tea when they came to hang out with George, their horse, on the weekends,” said architect Nicholas Russo.

“Although the project eventually developed into something slightly more extravagant, the modesty of the original ambition is still evident in the ‘no-frills’ detailing and rugged materiality of the finished building,” Russo added.

Sections of corrugated Colorbond iron clad the asymmetric roof and two side walls, which feature narrow horizontal windows.

The front and rear walls are entirely glazed, so the owners can open the interior to a deck overlooking the lake.

The main space in the building is an open-plan living room and kitchen featuring a wood-burning stove. A central bathroom divides this space from a studio and bedroom at the rear, which offers views out into the countryside.

The interior is lined with unfinished low-grade plywood and rough-sawn timber boards. “The timber was used to create a soft, warm, cocoon-like interior which is a direct contrast to the robust external shell,” Russo told Dezeen.

The cabin is entirely self-sustaining. Along with wood fired heating, it features solar panels and tanks for collecting and recycling rainwater.

Here’s a project description from architect Nicholas Russo:

Pump House

Typically an architectural outcome is the product of a lengthy design, documentation & construction process where the ‘vision’ is communicated to both client and builder predominantly through detailed drawings and a paper-trail of addendums, RFI’s & variations.

The Pump House was different. Constructed and largely conceptualised by the owner on free weekends and rainy Mondays, the compact, re-locatable structure is more a product of rigorous discussion than that of resolved drawings… that’s not to downplay the careful consideration that was applied to the details of the house, it’s just that the way this project evolved meant that things could, more often than not, be resolved through a conversation on site and detail etched into the clay with a rusty nail.

The nature in which this project was realised meant that our involvement was quite informal as we were consulted with on an ad-hoc basis during the design & construction solely in regards to architectural detailing and the overall architectural outcome. It was exciting to be involved in a project where we could focus purely on the aesthetic and architectural outcomes of a building.

Having worked on a couple of challenging projects with the owner (a carpenter) previously, we often found ourselves deliberating over ideas revolving around establishing a methodology to design & build small scale structures that would achieve both a simplicity of construction as well as a successful architectural outcome. We regularly discussed the possibility of developing an architectural alternative to the conventional ‘off the shelf’ house and we were united in our refusal to concede that architectural detailing, simplicity of construction and affordability were mutually exclusive.

The Pump House was driven by the intersection of these three prerequisites – it had to be a considered response (architectural detailing), it had to be easy to build (simplicity of construction) & it had to be cost effective (affordability) – and in many ways is an architectural prototype that tests our responses to these age old dilemmas… it’s very much like a 1:1 concept model based on ideas which evolved through our discussions and previous experiences.

The Pump House is a celebration of the ordinary. Uncompromising in it’s simplicity, there is a rigid adherence to some very modest but key ideas about doing away with the unnecessary. Agricultural materials (Colorbond iron, low-grade plywood & rough sawn timber) are put together with carefully considered old-fashioned craftsmanship (custom made on-site windows, doors & joinery) to create something much more than the sum of their parts. In plan, the compact internal spaces arranged simply around a central service core provide only the very basic requirements of uncomplicated living, an idea that is reinforced by the uncomplicated nature of the architecture.

A semi-permanent structure, the Pump House sits softly on its site adjacent to a large dam and on the threshold between the open paddocks and the bush land surrounds. Large expanses of glazing along with a North/South orientation allow the sunlight and the wide-open green spaces to penetrate into, and seemingly pass through, the internal volume giving the condensed areas a sense of spaciousness. The formal gesture of the black box external shell creates a robust metal ‘cocoon’ within the landscape that is directly contrasted by the warmth of the timber lined internal spaces. A large horizontal window along the western facade provides the only penetration of the metal cocoon while also allowing afternoon light to filter through the dense treetop canopy and into the spaces.

The original brief was for a temporary shed-like space to house the water pump and other farm equipment as well as to provide the owners with somewhere sheltered to have a cup of tea when they came to hang out with George (their horse) on the weekends …and although the project eventually developed into something slightly more extravagant, the modesty of the original ambition is still evident in the ‘no-frills’ detailing and rugged materiality of the finished building.

The Pump House is fully ‘off grid’ and self-sustainable utilising rainwater tanks, wood heating and solar power.

The post Pump House by Branch Studio Architects
is a metal-clad lakeside retreat appeared first on Dezeen.

A wall clad in slabs of red volcanic stone conceals the entrance to this otherwise minimal white house in a suburb of Reykjavík, Iceland, by local office PK Arkitektar (+ slideshow).

The private home was designed by PK Arkitektar with a simple and solid facade that restricts views of the interior from the street, providing privacy in a busy suburban neighbourhood.

“The house was conceived to be viewed from the street as a singular solid mass, and its entrance is hidden from the street,” the architects pointed out.

A recessed surface of red rhyolite stone is framed by a white wall that forms the front of the building and shelters a doorway incorporated into the stone surface.

A vertical glass section interrupts the front facade and permits views through the central circulation spaces of the home.

This glazed void helps to separate the private spaces from shared areas inside the house and allows daylight to permeate both floors of the property.

The facade at the northeast corner is separated from the glazed wall and floats above the ground, creating a small gap that lets light reach all the way to the basement level.

From the entrance at the level of the adjacent road, the site slopes down towards a sheltered garden and the home’s lower storey is partly submerged in the slope.

The rear of the house is more open, with both levels featuring expansive windows that look out onto the garden.

“The sloping plot allows for the basement to be hidden and provides magnificent views of the surrounding nature of the Alftanes peninsula,” the architects added.

Staircases on either side of the building descend to the basement level and a door on one facade is set into a

Sliding doors lead from the kitchen to a large balcony for outdoor dining that ends in a staircase connecting this space with the garden below.

Gravel surfaces surrounding the house reference the barren landscape of the local countryside, with a lawn containing a single tree at the rear providing the only area of greenery.

Photography is by Rafael Pinho.

Here’s some more information from the architects:

B25, Reykjavík, Iceland

This private residence is located in a compact suburban neighbourhood and the plot slopes down from street level towards its southwest corner.

The house was conceived to be viewed from the street as a singular solid mass and its entrance is hidden from the street. By contrast, the rear aspect, with private outdoor areas, has a sense of openness and permeability. The monolithic mass conceals a recess, which hides the front door.

The front volume is lightened by an incision, which represents the interior boundary between private and public areas. A light well behind the front façade permits daylight into both floors in the northeast part of the house. The sloping plot allows for the basement to be hidden and provides magnificent views of the surrounding nature of the Alftanes peninsula.

Red Rhyolite is employed here as cladding on the recessed surfaces of the otherwise white monolith. The front yard is a minimal desert of gravel and stone, greenery being restricted to a patch at the rear where a single tree stands. In stark contrast with the green walls and lush gardens common to Arnarnes, the arid treatment of the front yard applied here is more in line with the country’s nature and landscapes.

The post Volcanic stone wall hides doorway
into B25 house by PK Arkitektar appeared first on Dezeen.

Charred cedar clads the walls of this house in Aichi, Japan, by architecture studio MDS, while exposed wooden beams create a rack-like effect on the underside of the diagonally slanted roof.

Like many houses owned by young families in Japan, Okazaki House was built on the same site as the residence of the client’s parents.

Tokyo-based studio MDS used a traditional charring technique known as Yakisugi to blacken the cedar planks used for the building’s exterior, helping to protect the building from decay.

The site naturally slopes down from one side to the other, so the architects created a single-storey dwelling containing a series of tiered levels.

An entrance leads into the house at the uppermost level, where the living room is located. The floor then steps down to create a dining room in the middle and a kitchen at the lowest level.

“This enables people to maintain the same level of eyesight, and retains an exquisite sense of distance,” said the architects, explaining how they wanted to maintain an open-plan atmosphere.

Pendant lamps hang down from between the ceiling beams to illuminate worktops and seating areas, while a piece of built-in furniture provides shelving and a desk.

A small courtyard with a tree at its centre cuts into the volume of the building, separating living spaces from the master bedroom.

A second bedroom and bathroom are tucked away on one side and residents have to step down again to access them.

Polished oak floorboards run throughout the house, while latticed wooden screens can be used to partition spaces when required.

Photography is by Forward Stroke Inc.

Here’s a project description from the architects:

Okazaki House

The generation gap has become a problem in Japan in recent years. There are an increasing number of two-family homes, as well as houses built on the lots of parents’ houses. This house is one of the latter. Although the residents are parents and child, solicitude should be expressed with this not-so-large site.

This house is a one-storey building with a shed roof, which lowers the roof height on the side of the parents’ house, resulting in wide views maintained with open sky from the parents’ house.

For the interior space, the shape of the large shed roof is directly exposed, and two angled walls (canted walls) are placed in this open-space. This simple design creates various interior spaces in both plan and cross-section. The floor levels of the rooms are decided based on the ground height around the building, and are planned to utilise the height differences.

The site is sloped from north to south, and the west side, where the parents’ house stands, is lower. The main bedroom is located at the highest part of the site, the north-east side; across from a central courtyard, the level gradually slopes towards the south, from the living room, to the dining room and to the kitchen. This enables people to maintain the same level of eyesight, and retains an exquisite sense of distance.

For the framework of the roof, standard cedar lumber of 120x120mm, which is commonly sold on the market, is used. Instead of using custom sizes or laminated wood, the lumber is alternately laid over the beams within the maximum standard length of 6m, and is crisscrossed at the upper part of the canted walls that roughly divide the interior. This creates an impressive ceiling surface as well as functioning as the roof framework.

Company name: MDS Co.Ltd
Architecture: Kiyotoshi Mori & Natsuko Kawamura / MDS
Location: Okazaki-City, Aichi
Principal Use: residence

Structure: wood
Site Area: 213.74 sqm
Total Floor Area: 98.17 sqm /1F
Exterior finish: yakisugi / cedar forms exposed concrete
Roof: galvanised colour steel sheet standing-seam roofing
Floor: oak flooring
Wall: plasterer
Ceiling: oregon pine of 120 x 120 mm

The post Charred timber clads walls of
Okazaki House by MDS appeared first on Dezeen.

Canadian studio Naturehumaine inserted a glass floor and skylight to draw sunlight through the interior of this two-storey house in Montreal, and reintroduced wooden boards to make a feature of the staircase.

Naturehumaine renovated and extended the narrow house on 8th Avenue, Rosemount, for a family of four. An extra family room was added on the ground floor with a new master bedroom above, while the rear facade was replaced with a patterned surface of bright yellow and green panels.

The glass floor provides a visual connection between the ground-floor dining room and a hallway above. A skylight of the same size sits directly above – a feature that architect Stéphane Rasselet says the studio often adds to the centre of houses.

“In this case the clients needs didn’t allow us to give up the valuable floor area that would be lost with a double-height space, so we added the glass floor below the skylight,” he told Dezeen.

The architects retained original structural beams and boards, using them to create a wooden wall flanking the staircase. They also inserted a few into the ceiling void below the skylight.

“Back when this building was built, structural walls were built out of interlocking pieces of solid wood, similar to a log cabin, but with flat faces,” said Rasselet. “We like to expose these walls like you would expose an existing brick wall.

“We find our clients like the warmth of the wood, as well as exposing the history of their house, which contrasts with the new contemporary elements,” he added.

The existing interior was completely reorganised. The ground floor entrance leads in through a living room to the kitchen and dining area at the centre of the plan, while the new room at the rear opens out to the terrace and garden.

Upstairs, a pair of bedrooms overlook the street in front of the property, while the master bedroom occupies the rear behind the bathroom.

Walls of black bricks extend through the facade, forming both interior and exterior surfaces, while floors feature a mixture of white-painted wooden boards and dark slate tiles.

Photography by Adrien Williams.

Here’s a project description from Naturehumaine:

8th Ave.

This intervention transformed a residential two storey duplex in Rosemount into a single dwelling unit by completely reorganising the interior and constructing a 430 sqft extension in the rear.

The extension includes a master bedroom on the second floor and a family room that gives onto an intimate garden at ground level. Standing proud on a typical Montreal laneway, the extension acts as a beacon of novelty and dynamism. While little work was done to the front facade, this extension was designed in contrast, with bright colours, an angled form, and generous glazing.

Work on the interior centred on exposing and highlighting the beauty of existing wooden structural walls and beams and supporting them with a more subtle pallet of materials. Natural daylight is brought into the core with a large skylight and glass floor placed at the centre of the house.

Type: Single family house
Intervention: Interior re-organisation and extension
Location: 8th Ave. Montreal, Canada
Area: 1630 sqft

The post Montreal house by Naturehumaine features
a glass floor with a skylight overhead appeared first on Dezeen.

Architecture studio AOC has renovated a four-storey townhouse in north London, adding wall-hung vintage bicycles and timber mouldings based on the faces of the resident family.

Named Bonhôte House, the nineteenth-century property was remodelled by London-based AOC to create a contemporary family home for a boutique owner, a film producer and their young children.

The house now features an open-plan interior designed to meet the family’s need for space, with a two-storey-high gallery added for displaying vintage bicycles and artwork.

A large portion of the original ground floor was removed, enabling the architects to create the double-height gallery at the front of the house.

The new entrance hall allows natural light to fill the room through an original Victorian window with folding shutters. Two bicycles hang on hooks from an adjacent wall, ensuring that they can be seen from various angles.

Shelving built into the walls provides a space for displaying the family’s large collection of books and objects.

“The family had a fascinating collection of artefacts they wished to display, from Dan Holdsworth prints to Paris flea market nicknacks,” architect Geoff Shearcroft told Dezeen.

To add character, the architects used the facial profiles of each family member to produce a series of bespoke timber mouldings, which are dotted throughout the interior.

These create a ripple effect when joined together and act as a contemporary counterpoint to the original Victorian skirting boards and architraves.

“Much ornament in architecture has the human form as its basis and we continued this tradition with a very literal translation of facial profile into moulding,” said Shearcroft.

Across the lower ground floor, a tiled floor with a basket-weave pattern connects the living space with the kitchen and provides a hard-wearing surface for the growing family.

“We explored a variety of patterns but the basket weave offered the right combination of rich associations, closed openness and playful variation,” said the architect.

In the kitchen, mirrored laminate surfaces create an extension of the pattern and reflect light back into the room.

A slumped concrete sofa sits at the foot of a brass decorative staircase, which leads up to bedrooms and bathrooms on the first floor.

Continuing up through the property, the original floor plan has been altered to connect the master bedroom to an en suite that overlooks the park.

“We re-configured the plan to create a series of different character spaces that were visually and vertically connected,” added Shearcroft.

The house is located in Stoke Newington, just a stone’s throw away from Dezeen’s offices. AOC Architecture previously remodelled an Edwardian property in Golders Green, north-west London.

Photography is by Tim Soar.

Here’s a description of Bonhôte House from the architects:

Bonhôte House, Stoke Newington, London

The Bonhôte House is a four storey townhouse in Stoke Newington, home to a film producer, a boutique owner and their young children. The couple needed more room for a growing family, and for their contemporary art and vintage bicycle collections, than their previous Shoreditch, East London mews house offered. They asked AOC to design a home that felt big yet intimate, luxurious yet useful, sophisticated yet playful, beautiful yet cosy.

The original 19th century property was narrow, dark and unwelcoming, and had been stripped bare by its previous owners. A key architectural move has been to remove a large area of floor, merging basement and ground levels at the front of the house to create a generous double height gallery, into which a new decorative stair descends from the entrance hall. This act of opening-up brings natural light into the basement living space, and creates expansive walls for display of large artworks and objects and for storage of valuable books.

On the upper levels, non-structural walls have been relocated to shape a range of spaces appropriate to the family’s lives. Throughout the property, new doors and internal windows connect individual rooms while maintaining distinctions between them, offering glimpses through the house itself, and then out into the city beyond.

The family wanted a characterful home, contemporary in tone without feeling ‘new’. In response, AOC enriched bare walls with bespoke timber profiles created from the facial profiles of family members – a reinterpretation of traditional mouldings. Used as skirtings, architraves and linings, these ornamental features ensure each room is uniquely tailored to its inhabitants. In the lower, more public, levels, all four mouldings are combined to create a rippling timber lining that softens and connects.

A unique domestic character has been created through deploying a range of materials, chosen for their associative qualities, to create diverse surface effects. A slumped concrete sofa, tinted green, anchors the new staircase at the centre of the plan, before evolving into a kitchen work surface. The use of mirrored laminate on storage units helps them dissolve into their surroundings, while providing endless games of reflection for the children. A basket weave floor pattern, used in a variety of scales and materials, reinforces the individual characters of different parts of the house whilst creating a coherent whole.

The architects worked closely with the family to ensure the house could support the visual choreography of special objects, while still being a practical space, able to manage their storage needs in a discreet, integrated way. The subsequent combination of bespoke panelling with open shelves, interspersed with glazed, mirror and even secret doors, bestows an ‘instant maturity’ upon the home, as though the family have been there for generations.

The post AOC adds wall-hung bicycles and basket-weave
flooring to London townhouse appeared first on Dezeen.