For a big family, their friends and relatives, a comfortable and modern holiday home was built. The house fits smoothly in its environment although it is located on top of a sand dune in the open landscape of this Dutch Island. The house needed to be spacious and practical besides being nice. Multiple fixed interior elements were integrated in the design. Consequently a spatial holiday home was realized in which landscape, house and interior are optimally connected.
When a client approached Johannesburg-based Architects Of Justice and commissioned an avant-garde retreat he could disappear to, a journey began which would culminate in a recent Commendation for the project in the Mpumalanga Institute for Architecture (MPIA) Awards for Architecture 2017.
The site for the project, situated within the Mjejane Private Game Reserve – a private Big 5 game reserve incorporated into the Kruger National Park – opens onto a view of the Crocodile River on the north boundary with a green belt on its eastern edge. The retreat was designed to maximise the connection to nature and wild game while ensuring privacy between the five en-suite bedrooms as well as from neighbouring lodges. The rigorous estate guidelines motivated the architects to design around the existing flora on the site, which led to a freeform design that required only three trees to be replanted.
New Zealand was the last landmass to be inhabited, and then deforested with unrivalled speed. Its new cleared landscapes are still so young they shift, when they fail new native trees grow. It might take a hundred years or more, but buildings that participate in this shift could one day inhabit near-original forest. This is something new, for New Zealand architecture was established and has remained in clearings. To inhabit its original forest landscape, architecture must understand existing context rather than generate new landscapes, it must be soft, patient and ready to change; as we exhibited at the 2015 Prague International Architecture Festival entitled Soft-Context:Soft-Architecture.
This holiday home, of a Mediterranean character, was built half a century ago using traditional Catalan construction methods. It has been refurbished and modernised internally to increase natural light. The kitchen and porch have been extended to create a courtyard to connect the interior living areas with the outdoor. This offers shade and the addition of a pool completes the integration of these areas.
Six luxury villas has been built in holiday park Duynzoom. Plato Wood Fraké was used for cladding. The entire villa is covered with the same wooden slats. The villa is a reinterpretation of the Texel Sheep Boet. The design, by Studio JVM from Amsterdam, shows the stylish strength of wooden cladding.
This 230m2 private house was designed as a residence in the surroundings of Vienna to create holiday feeling 12 month of the year. The 2 storey building provides an astonishing view of the vineyards, presenting the viewers a colourful play throughout the 4 seasons. While the first floor solely acts as a functional area, comprising of the garage, storage rooms and a functional kitchen to serve food at the pool, the second floor opens up as a spacious living and sleeping area. The terrace in the second floor with the glass ceiling is the perfect spot to follow the sunrise and enjoy breakfast. The surrounding garden forms an ideal interface between the modern building and the surrounding nature.
Project of a detached holiday house on the slope of a hill in Hohenthurn, Austria. The project is aimed at complying with the type of a mountain house for both design and materials used.
Eyrie comprises two houses near Kaiwaka. Each is barely larger than four sheets of plywood. They are made from wood, are off-grid and autonomous, their outsides burnt black. This project is part polemic, part escape. Holiday homes have become this country’s decadence. Our sub-prime estuarine site permitted a 1500m² palace. It forbade two 29m² cabins. At night we talked excitedly about Malevich’s Suprematism; in the morning we got up and wrote legal submissions on visual density and the attrition of driveways. We wanted a different vision for New Zealand’s coastal future. In these houses a history of prismatic abstraction is conflated with a poetic of small boats bobbing in a sea of grass. There are no doors. One climbs up boulders and in through a window instead. We hoped that in subverting the shorthand language of building these little constructions might feel like something other than – and more than – houses.
The quality of the existing dwelling consists not only of the building itself, but also of the surroundings and orientation. On renovating the existing building the architects worked with local materials to stay as close as possible to the original design. Logically the main living room was relocated in an extension oriented on the beautiful surroundings of the small and rural town of Villers-en-Fagne. This extension was conceived in a delicate and quite sober structure. The living area is suspended between the two slabs of roof and floor. The connection with the terrace and the green and hilly surroundings is optimized for a relaxing and enjoyable stay.
This is a weekend house located on the central coast of Chile, 160 kilometers away from Santiago. The brief was to design a family house that could fit up to 12 people within a hilly site where the sea views are only possible in its highest point. In response to this, one of the main strategies was to rise the house above the surrounding dwellings and maximize the built area at that level, arranging the public programme on top and the private programme on the bottom. Due to the house faces south, the main floor follows a sloping roof that brings light from north and protects the public area from the sunset. Beside it, a lower height volume faces the street, concentrating the kitchen and main services, which are treated with a system of sliding shutters that control the privacy and views from the exterior. This volume does not only work as a buffer zone between exterior and interior but also as a scalar element that conceals the overall size of the house. In terms of materials, intention behind the choice of them was to use rough and cheapest construction systems such as concrete and brick for the core structure and then start dressing the house with finer elements such as glass, timber and steel that could give lightness to the house. These are used in many ways in the upper storey, becoming the flooring, ceiling, staircases, and ventilated cladding, among others.
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