Hasta La Ideas

Bamboo poles were used to clad the facade and surrounding walls of this house in the Philippines by Swiss-Filipino studio Atelier Sacha Cotture (+ slideshow).

The family home in the city of Parañaque is located in a residential neighbourhood and was designed by the Philippines office of Atelier Sacha Cotture. It wraps a central courtyard to restrict views of the interior from adjacent properties.

“The courtyard solution has been chosen for its qualities of efficiency and privacy,” said the architects. “This typology was widely used during the Spanish colonial era here in the Philippines.”

The street-facing facade presents a uniform surface of vertical bamboo poles that incorporates doors to the garage and the house’s main entrance.

Explaining the choice of bamboo, the architects said: “It is a low cost and sustainable material that grows intensively locally. This material has been historically used in the country for the fabrication of handicrafts, native architecture and utilitarian objects.”

The material was treated to protect it from mould and pests, before being stained and varnished to enrich its natural tone and increase its resilience.

The bamboo-covered doorway leads from the street into a dark corridor clad in a type of local granite called Araal, which is also used to cover chunky supporting columns at the ground floor level of the house.

The corridor is illuminated by a shimmering chandelier suspended from the ceiling and opens onto an uncovered courtyard with a lawn at its centre.

A wood-decked pathway crosses a narrow pond to lead into a foyer. It continues through to the main living spaces, which feature sliding glass doors framed in locally grown mahogany.

These ground floor areas, including the dining room, living room and kitchen, overlook the courtyard and the pond that runs along its back edge.

An outdoor dining area is sheltered beneath a walkway that connects the study on the first floor with a garden on the garage roof.

The first floor can be reached by a staircase made from wooden treads that cantilever from the wall of the living room. A family room and two bedrooms are also contained on the first floor, with another staircase featuring a vertical bamboo screen ascending to the top storey.

The master bedroom on the top floor has a wall made from a mosaic of coconut bark tiles and sliding doors which lead onto a terrace that wraps around the corner and houses a separate salon.

Photography is by Luca Tettoni.

Here’s a project description from the architects:

House in Parañaque

Location

The house is located in the residential subdivision of Better Living in Paranaque City, Metro Manila. The area features a low density neighbourhood of houses and low rise buildings.

Program

The program is a 465sqm family house on a 360sqm lot. The entrance foyer, garage and service area face the access road while dining, living room and kitchen overlook the private courtyard. The first floor hosts a family room and a private quarter with two bedrooms along with a guest-office room with access to a roof garden. The master bedroom occupies the second floor with its own salon, changing room and bathroom.

Planning

The house has 250sqm of landscaped courtyard, accessible roof garden and terrace.The courtyard solution has been chosen for its qualities of efficiency and privacy. This typology has been widely used during Spanish colonial era here in the Philippines.

Materials

Bamboo is the chosen material for this project. It is a low cost and sustainable material that grows intensively locally. This material has been historically used in the country for the fabrication of handicrafts, native architecture and utilitarian objects.The bamboo poles are treated against moulds and pests then stained and varnished. They are protected by ledges that also prevent the direct sunlight from penetrating into the house, while on the top floor the layers of bamboos are doubled.

The courtyard is bordered by a pond running all its length with a vertical water feature facing the living and dining room. Small shells and crushed Adobe stone are incrusted into the render. At night, the wall lighted up from the pond.

The base of the main house and the entrance foyer is clad with Araal, local granite. All windows, cabinets and beds have been designed and fabricated with Mahogany wood, also available locally.

Stones for the bathrooms and living room come from the nearby island of Romblon. There is also a wall featured made of coconut bark in the master bedroom. Capiz is used for most of the lamps.

Energy

Electricity is partially provided by solar panels placed on the top roof.

Completion date: June 2011
Land area: 360sqm
Project area: 465sqm
Client: Private
Address: 95 Luxembourg St., Better Living subd. Paranaque City, Philippines
Styling and furnishing: Milo Naval

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Philippines by Atelier Sacha Cotture appeared first on Dezeen.

Interior designer Olena Yudina used a monochrome colour palette for the redesign of this apartment in Kiev, adding glazed brick walls to every room and a recurring bird motif to bring the owners good luck (+ slideshow).

Olena Yudina remodelled the interior of an apartment in a multi-storey residential complex to create the home for her friend’s young family.

White masonry with contrasting dark grouting provides a consistent element throughout the interior, which has a minimal colour palette of white, black, grey tones and warm wood.

Yudina told Dezeen that the birds, which appear in a sculpture, on cushions and as suspended decorations, were included because she believes that “birds bring luck and a feeling of freedom”.

The apartment is divided into private and guest areas, with the bathroom, dressing room, a laundry room and a spare bedroom located off a small corridor.

The rest of the interior is arranged as an interconnected series of rooms that maximises the available space by avoiding the need for further hallways.

Additional glazing between the living room and two balconies was installed in place of solid walls to increase the amount of daylight reaching the interior.

Tall radiators in a graphite grey contrast with the white walls they’re mounted on, helping to enhance the height of the living area.

Wood was used for flooring, furniture and fitted cabinetry to add colour and texture to the simple scheme, while pot plants in the living room provide a natural element with a green accent.

Much of the furniture is freestanding to avoid reducing the available floor and wall space of the rooms. “Though this furniture looks more massive, at the same time it is roomier and gives more usable space to store things,” said Yudina.

The bathroom is entirely clad in grey stone tiles with black details such as the window frame, sink unit structure and a suspended towel rail complementing the taps and bath fittings.

Photography is by Andrey Avdeenko.

The designer sent us this project description:

Apartment with the Birds

From the entrance, apartment divided into two parts: private and guest. In a small corridor are symmetrically situated auxiliary rooms: guest bathroom (closer to the living room), extra dressing room (closer to the bedroom) and compact laundry.

Rest of the space was set aside for the residential room: living room, cabinet, bedroom with dressing and another bathroom. Rooms in an apartment arranged in a circle, one room passes into another; thereby we have avoided lots of small corridors, and living room can be extended by the space of cabinet. We dismantled walls of two balconies and glazed them to make more space and to bring more light to the rooms.

The monochrome range of the apartment – this is on what you firstly pay attention, and perhaps, wins over by its evenness and emphasis this apartment. The main colors we used in interior are black, perfect white, gradation of grey and rare speckles of green – wooden texture looks great in such an environment (variation on the theme of eco).

Fragmentary, there is brickwork in every room, which can be controversial as an idea, but in whole it connects all the rooms in one space. Also we made graphite radiators on the white background – looks very effective, by such contrasting verticals we wanted visually to extend the space, for the same reason we have overstated doorways. The furniture is minimized and looks extremely simple.

The apartment looks very clean, restrained and minimalistic, there are not lots of details, but it still not rid of them – everything is pertinently. Together with foreign furniture manufactures there are represented Ukrainian brands: Zuccheti/KOS, Meridiani, Arbonia, La Lampe Gras, Odesd2 (Kiev), LoveMosaic (Kiev), SwetaYaremko(Kiev), Gizmo(Lviv).

Location: Ukraine, Kiev
Total area: 124 sq.m.

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Kiev apartment by Olena Yudina appeared first on Dezeen.

This wooden home in Helsinki by Finnish architect Tuomas Siitonen has a roof that dips in the middle to allow views across it and a kinked plan that wraps around a secluded garden (+ slideshow).

Constructed on a sloping plot in the garden of a house occupied by the client’s parents, the building was designed by Siitonen to provide two separate apartments – one for a couple and their two children, and another for the children’s great-grandmother.

The ground floor contains an accessible apartment for the great-grandmother, while a larger apartment for the family occupies the two upper storeys.

“The brief was to design an inspiring and environmentally sensible house incorporating a separate flat for a grandmother, or for example to be used by one of the children in the future,” Siitonen told Dezeen.

The new house’s plan kinks to accommodate the contours of the site and to wrap around the garden it shares with the existing hundred-year-old property, increasing privacy while maintaining a connection with its neighbour.

On the other side, the building presents a closed facade to a nearby road and railway, while its height allows views from the upper floors and balcony.

“The plot was a north-facing slope, so I wanted to build something that rises up to provide light and views,” said Siitonen.

“The slope faces a busy road and a railway, which is why the house is more closed on that side and opens up towards the garden, making a small sheltering turn that follows the slope to make the terrace feel more intimate and to take the garden into the house.”

Siberian larch cladding covers the building’s exterior. It will turn grey over time and Siitonen said it was chosen to reflect the house’s natural setting.

As well as the accessible self-contained apartment, the ground floor contains utility areas and a sauna.

Upstairs is an open plan living and dining area incorporating a custom-made kitchen built from flamed birch.

Large windows look out onto a large wood-lined terrace perched among the treetops that can be heated by a fireplace that backs onto another one inside the living room.

Another staircase leads past windows that look out over the treetops to a mezzanine that is intended to give the space the feel of a treehouse, and on to the master bedroom housed in the loft.

Sustainability measures were a key part of the clients’ brief and informed the use of wood throughout the project and the use of a ground-sourced heat pump and underfloor heating that removes a need for radiators.

Exterior photography is by Tuomas Uusheimo. Interior photography is by Maija Luutonen.

Here’s a text about the project by Martta Louekari:

 House M-M, Helsinki, Finland

Someone should pick the children up from day-care; the grandparents would appreciate a visit; who’d have time to cook and help with the homework? What if the whole family lived together, on the same plot, even under the same roof?

Actors Vilma Melasniemi and Juho Milonoff wanted a home where the entire family, including grand- parents and great-grandmother could spend their time together. They were looking for space for the family and friends to be together, but also for the chance for everyone to have some privacy and their own room. That way the grandparents could help with childcare and great-grandmother would have company and a feeling of security.

A place was found on the plot of mother Vilma’s parents’ home in Helsinki’s Oulunkylä. The location of the 100-year-old house – in a garden of apple and lilac trees with a steep north-facing slope – imposed its own demands on the design. What was wanted was a house that would be contemporary and yet homely and full of character, that would respect its surroundings and the site’s natural features but would still constitute a clearly self-contained whole.

The new home was designed with two apartments. The lower storey is a level-access studio-apartment for Vilma Melasniemi’s 91-year-old grandmother. The ground floor also includes sauna and utility spaces.

The 120 square-metre apartment upstairs is the home of Vilma Melasniemi and Juho Milonoff and their 8 and 11-year-old children. The upstairs is comprised of a large reception room and a kitchen, made to measure in flamed birch, that serve as the whole family’s living space. In the summer this extends effortlessly outdoors via a large terrace.

The three-storey building sits comfortably on the slope, the large windows bringing in the green outside and creating a feel of a tree house. The tree house-like atmosphere is enhanced by the loft space situated over the kitchen and the stairs leading to the master bedroom with its view over the tree tops. The exterior of Siberian larch changes with the seasons and will gradually turn grey.

Mother Vilma Melasniemi’s parents continue to live in their wooden villa on the same plot. Because the roof of the new building dips in the middle, it does not affect the familiar view from the villa to the rising slope across the plot. The footprint of the new-build follows the shape of the slope and creates a bend making the garden more intimate and shielding it from the public roadway.

One important consideration was the building’s ecological sustainability. Most of the building is made of wood. The building has floor heating coupled to ground-source heat so stand-alone radiators are not necessary. The energy needed for cooling in the summer also comes from ground-source heat. Because of its large south facing roof space, in the future it will also be possible to make good use of solar energy.

“The large windows bring light and warmth right into the house. The exterior doesn’t need maintenance and the open fireplace heats up with wood from our own plot. We travel to work and into town by train. We believe these are sustainable solutions. One good home in a lifetime is enough!” says Vilma Melasniemi.

Finland’s baby-boomer generations are ageing; a demographic peak of 65 to 74-year-olds is expected in 2020, and there is already a shortage of care-home places and staff. The working day is long and school-age children are often forced to spend afternoons either at after-school clubs or home alone. Well-designed models for multi-generational living and functional architecture can help meet these challenges in the future.

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wraps around a sheltered garden appeared first on Dezeen.

News: architecture firm OMA is working on designs for a 167-metre skyscraper on Folsom Street in San Francisco.

OMA has teamed up with property developer Related California and non-profit organisation Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation to plan the tower as part of a residential development offering a mix of homes for sale and rent, of which 27 percent will be affordable.

Led by OMA partner Shohei Shigematsu, the design also features a pair of podium buildings and a row of townhouses.

The development will be constructed on a city-owned plot between First Street and Fremont Street – one of 11 sites being sold off to pay for the $4.2 billion Transbay Transit Centre housing development nearby.

The OMA team is understood to have offered San Francisco’s Office of Community Investment and Infrastructure $72 million for the plot, coming in ahead of bids from developers Millennium Partners and Golub & Co.

The project is OMA’s second recent appointment in California, following a commission for a major mixed-use public building for downtown Santa Monica.

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skyscraper appeared first on Dezeen.

This social housing block in Slovakia by Bratislava studio Nice Architects features a series of protruding balconies that angle towards sunlight whilst blocking out the noise of car traffic below (+ slideshow).

Nice Architects shaped the balconies in accordance with the sun’s trajectory across the facade of the four-storey North Star Apartments building, which is located in Senec, a small town outside of Bratislava.

The architects were tasked with creating social housing situated on a busy street that would be visually appealing but came at a low cost – €500 Euros per square metre.

“The goal was to enrich this locality and create an iconic, easy to remember and original building, as an opposite to the patchy and chaotic surrounding development,” said architect Tomas Zacek.

The building’s location, opposite the town’s observatory and perfect north-south orientation inspired the architects to name the building after the famous star.

“North Star is not only the brightest star on the northern hemisphere, it was traditionally used for high seas navigation,” explaned Zacek.

The building contains nine one-bedroom apartments across its three upper storeys, while five small shops occupy the ground floor.

Each apartment features one of the angular balconies, which protrude from the all-white facade at different lengths.

The top corner of every balcony is exposed to the south, reflecting the sun’s rays into the apartments. As the sun traverses the front, the shadows alter the appearance of the building depending on what time it is. They also offer seclusion from neighbours.

The lower sections of each balcony are deliberately enlarged on one side to shelter the space from oncoming traffic.

The windows that do not feature the enclosures are fitted with Juliette balconies and a small outer area covered in gravel.

All of the windows in the development face directly west, giving residents the opportunity to enjoy sunsets over the local school garden across the street.

On the ground floor, the facade is made up of monochrome stripes graduating from black to white to deter graffiti artists.

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at North Star Apartments by Nice Architects appeared first on Dezeen.