Designed by Sydney-based practice Matthew Woodward Architecture, the Wirra Willa Pavilion is a small but perfectly formed domestic retreat. Created to offer guests and visitors the chance to revel in the site's rich green landscape, the pavilion is intrinsically tied to its surroundings. 'It is a Miesian-inspired glass pavilion situated in a vibrant and fertile, rura...
At the edge of its car park, the ground falls away abruptly, a small brook threads its way through hornbeam and hawthorn trees and one swaps tarmac and plant rooms for woodland. Above this, raised on a series of glulaminated timber columns, is Wilkinson Eyre Architects' Maggie's Oxford Centre. This is the eighteenth centre of its kind to be built since the charity ope...
The home is 5200 sq ft of exquisite details - such as the tailor-made track guided pocket doors used throughout the house - all meticulously combed over by the client and Casas himself. Based on the idea of a 'permanent vacation', the house is designed to accommodate the owner's needs and lifestyle, as well as his wish for a place of tranquillity. The architect used w...
At first glance, the array of differently-sized windows cut out of the building's facade might look haphazard, but each one is strategically placed. Eschewing the convention for large glass elevations, Holmebakk has created smaller openings in the concrete mass that each frame a specific view. As well as offering vistas across the lake towards Hamar and Domkirkeodden, th...
Nestled into the crest of a leafy court, the house stands in contrast to the surrounding landscape. Built in the Victorian suburb of Portsea, the home is anything but common for the traditional resort town. 'It looks a bit like a spaceship has landed on the ground,' remarks architect Roger Wood. 'The house was inspired by the surrounding environment, tall white stone...
Situated in a town on the outskirts of Geneva within an elongated hillside plot, the newly-built house fills the site completely. Its three volumes are placed in line, one after the other in descending order, following the land's gentle slope. Made out of sturdy structural concrete, the three parts vary in height and can be distinguished by their double-sloped roofs, eac...
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, is home to a new family residence by Vo Trong Nghia Architects that aims to address this issue exactly. With only 0.25 per cent of the Vietnamese capital taken up by vegetation, House for Trees offers a welcome alternative, matching high-density living space with a large, tropical forest. Working within a tight budget, the architects create...
Initially conceived as a weekend retreat, the design - contained within a simple linear volume by British architect Piers Smerin - was so successful, the London-based owners soon made it their permanent residence. The existing 1920s summer house was replaced by Smerin with a design that, per the clients' brief, was practical to live in, easy to run and energy efficien...
Carved out of concrete and featuring the rough texture and imprints of its timber formwork, the house's textures were also chosen to act as a permanent reminder of its conception, process and creation. Created as a 'single monolithic concrete structure' that discretely unites indoors and outdoors, the six-bedroom house features clever openings, designed to preserve the o...
'In architecture there is an eternal tension between context and object' explain the firm's partners Mauricio Pezo and Sofía von Ellrichshausen. Guna House draws on this balance, and provides a worthy addition to the practice's growing portfolio. Compoesd as a single, strongly geometric volume, the house dramatically stakes a claim to its surroundings. The clients - a...
Vertical Forest connects to the policies for reforestation and naturalization of the edges of the large urban and metropolitan areas ( the Metroboschi ) : two devices of environmental survival , two ways to rebuild a relationship between nature and cities in the area and in the cities of contemporary Europe. The first example of a Bosco Verticale composed of two towers ...
To complete this part of the residential project Porta Nuova, another intervention by Cino Zucchi, who had already successfully occupied the adjacent lot. The layout of the buildings on the lot meets a number of objectives "urban" tied to a reading of the nature of public and private open spaces. The new urban front thus formed on the Via De Cristofori has two differe...
A striking, angular new volume balances above the granite walls of a 74 year-old country house in Portugal. Named Casa Taíde, it is the latest offering by local architects Rui Vieira Oliveira and Vasco Manuel Fernandes. The house's striking angular addition - folding to become the volume's walls and roof - replaced the existing wooden structure of the old house, whil...
Built for a Mexican couple and their two young girls, the house plays with contrasts in its design. Nestled amongst native oaks and mahogany trees, the structure appears reserved at first, reflecting the family's desire for privacy. Once inside though, the space spans dramatically outwards, flexing towards the garden to satisfy the client's desire for way of life that co...
The houses, designed by German architect and Bauhaus school founder Walter Gropius in 1925, were destroyed at the end of WWII and have now been abstractly reconstructed by Berlin-based practice Bruno Fioretti Marquez Architekten. The two buildings, named 'Gropius' and 'Moholy-Nagy', acted as the perfect architectural environment for our tailoring story 'Modern Lines'. ...
Faring Road House is a sophisticated modern home fit for its glamorous location in Los Angeles' Bel Air neighbourhood. Designed by East London-based architecture firm Quinn Architects, headed by Laurence Quinn, the house sits on a generous sloped site looking towards the Hollywood Hills. Luscious gardens surround the white-rendered property, helping to shield it from ...
As an architectural relative to a very successful Swedish denim brand, the initiative is called Happycheap and the scheme's first realised villa has made an impact in the Stockholm suburb where it's built. Carlsson's house stands out for its guaranteed competitive price - 1.54 SEK, thanks to its cost-efficient self-supporting sandwich panel construction - but also, for i...
Sitting at the foot of Lycabettus, the building saw the architect’s office and design school flourish, but it slowly fell into disrepair after his death in 1975. Enter Christos Joannou and Miltos Kambouridis, of local developer Cyclamino, who bought the building in 2007 with the aim to breathe new life into its iconic shell. The team commissioned London and Athens-bas...
Cabin at Norderhov provides both refuge from and connection to its woodland surroundings. A couple based in Oslo commissioned the project, with a view to using it as a weekend base for cross-country skiing and hiking. The structure was designed in response to their relationship with nature. Its prefabricated system of laminated wood reflects the surrounding trees and ...
Its stained-cedar skin takes its cue from the dense woods that surround it, ensuring a calm presence within the landscape, while its strong composition of two long, overlapping volumes stretches out dynamically to frame Lake Minnetonka. The retreat was designed for a family and is located 20 miles from their permanent home in Minneapolis, within an area peppered by la...
'The whole house, including the roof, is made to blend with the existing topography of the area,' explains project architect Håvard B Olsen, who led the design. 'We focused on getting good sunlight in all rooms, views and floating connections between inside and outside.' To achieve this, the modern building is carved asymmetrically into the land; a clear break from the n...
Set up by artist Bosco Sodi and directed by Patricia Martin (former director and curator of La Colección Jumex), the art foundation is situated on the outskirts of Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, about 500 miles southwest of Mexico City. Sodi 'always admired Ando's architecture' and approached the Japanese Pritzker Prize-winning architect for the design of his foundation's new...
''Migdia' - meaning 'midday' in Catalan - references the southern position of the sun at noon,' explain the architects, who used the way the light comes into the building as a driving force in the townhouse's design. They add, 'The house is similarly oriented towards the south and plays with qualities of light and temperature.' Located a short drive from Barcelona, th...
Having bought a beautiful plot of wooded land in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, the client dreamt of building a country house that would be in perfect symbiosis with its natural environment. This rugged, sloped site came to a natural plateau just below its highest point, becoming the perfect location to erect the house. The house is characterized by two stacked volumes; ...
The area features a hilly, rural landscape and is covered with beautiful old cork oaks. The climate is mild and dry. The primary intention here is to create a secluded garden. The surrounding walls are up to five and a half meters high to provide the necessary shade and the entire impression created is one of a desert, dry, stony and dusty. Everything is constructed f...
At the edge of the forest, between a valley and a grassy marsh, the Panorama house is a refined interpretation of the traditional cottage, complete with pitched metal roof and dark-stained Eastern cedar shingles. Sitting on a typically rolling Laurentian site, the house is based on a simple rectangular volume. The orange front door leads to the ground floor, where the...
The entry side of the house appears very solid with its thick super-insulated wood clad walls and narrow strip windows enclosing the bathrooms, outdoor showers, stair, and laundry room. Little is revealed until entering the house through a tall glass door that emerges as one approaches the house. Once inside, the living and dining rooms, which occupy the building’s cente...
Due to the configuration of the programmatic proposal, with a continuous plinth-like ground floor, three tower blocks in the foreground, and a linear block to the rear of the land lot, the façades are planned, in formal terms and despite the height of the complex, to ensure a rhythmic, lightweight look. The street façade on the bottom floor is designed as a plinth that ...
The design of the house responds to both its setting and to the seasons, whilst regulating and maximising upon the effects of these. Assimilating the landscape The organisation of the house is defined by its external conditions. The more intimate working and sleeping areas are located towards the back, where the enclosure of the nearby woods provides an intimate, pr...
Henley Halebrown Rorrison Architects (HHbR) has completed “1-6 Copper Lane”, London’s first co-housing development. Located in Stoke Newington, in North London, the project consists of six homes and shows how architecture can respond to a new social need that has arisen through changes in both lifestyles and economics. City dwellers, especially in London, are looking at ...
Design strategy The program: a house. Our concept: universal need for shelter. Solution: a void.In order to protect we extract mass instead of adding it. We create a negative, abstract space. This emptiness is the generator of an inverted house which organises itself in a pentagonal loop. Hidden for the elements, the house is its own horizon, reflecting itself encircli...
Architects Panos Dragonas and Varvara Christopoulou believe there is no longer anywhere remote enough to build a wilderness hideaway, so have instead proposed a cabin raised above the Athens rooftops. As the world becomes increasingly urbanised, and digital mapping extends across deserts and jungles, there can be no more unexplored corners of the globe for a traveller t...
The Village Health Works Staff Housing accommodates an 18-bed dormitory for the healthcare workers of a medical centre in the 16-hectare village of Kigutu. It was designed by New York-based Louise Braverman as part of a wider masterplan for the area. The building was constructed from locally produced bricks, interspersed with a mixture of timber cladding and brightly ...
More than 900 bamboo poles were used to construct this home, designed by architect Enrique Mora Alvarado for a site in a remote Ecuadorian rainforest (+ slideshow).Casa Convento is situated on a plot surrounded by mountains, a small creek and a bamboo forest. Recognising the importance of using local resources to reduce the cost of the project – and address the diffic...
Squeezed between two existing buildings in Barcelona, this family home by Alventosa Morell Arquitectes features a steel frame, a timber facade and two street-facing balconies (+ slideshow).Spanish studio Alventosa Morell Arquitectes designed CP House for a 15-metre-long site in the Nou Barris district of Barcelona. Sandwiched between a high-rise apartment block and a ...
Mirrors create a reflective facade on this pair of holiday homes in the South Tyrolean Dolomites, but have been coated with a glare-reducing film to help prevent bird collisions (+ slideshow). Designed by Italian architect Peter Pichler, the Mirror Houses are two adjoining guesthouses for short-term rent on a farm outside the city of Bolzano, north-east Italy. Pichle...
