Denmark Home For Architect Jesper Brask Is Made From 150 Local Trees and Kolumbia Tiles.

Both New Zealand's Elle Decoration magazine and the Stylepark website have featured small glimpses of this beautiful weekend house located on the Kattegat Fjord in Denmark designed and developed by architect Jesper Brask of Brask & Leonhardt for himself. Intrigued by the design, I searched for more images of both the exterior and interior and after much digging, found them.





The home was called the Tree House in the July, 2011 issue of New Zealand Elle Decor and the article mentioned how Brask harvested 150 trees from the very forest in which the home was constructed, cut them into raw beams and left them to dry for three years before beginning to build his long-awaited holiday home.





Stylepark features the home in an article about the "Kolumba" tiles used as building materials. The Stylepark article states that it took two years for a Finnish carpenter to erect the house's wooden structure using only wooden dowels; no screws. The living area is on the ground floor, with a column in the center combining the fireplace and kitchen island.



A large chimney core made of "Kolumba" tiles is now the architectural centerpiece and the anchorage to the plot of land. On the outward-facing side there is a fireplace for cooler days, while inside, where the chimney dominates the interior design, it has a work surface for preparing food and is at once a stove and airless oven. Brask was looking for a suitable material himself to serve as a harmonious counterpoint to the dominant spruce when he came across Petersen's "Kolumba" tiles in an architecture magazine.




"I wanted a stone of the same size and with the same surface effect, and so I visited the brickworks, which, together with the architects Lundgaard and Tranberg had just developed a new version of the "Kolumba" tile for the theater in Copenhagen. "Kolumba" was available in two versions then, but I wanted a stone that looked like another stone from the Petersen range. The brickworks obliged and produced a new version in yellow, English clay: The tiles are shaped and painted with white clay paste by hand before they are dried and fired. The result: light colors and a very special transparency, which blends harmoniously with the light, untreated spruce wood."



images courtesy of Brask & Leonhardt, Stylepark (by Anders Sune Berg), and Elle Decoration



Petersen's Kolumbia tiles can be found here

The Hillhouse Of Melbourne, Australia By Andrew Maynard Architects.

Interior:








Text about the home from Andrew Maynard Architects:

The problem/opportunity:
Design is complex. There is little that is more complex to design than a home, however fundamental issues offer an architect a starting point; where is the sun? How do we capture it in winter, how do we exclude it in summer?

The thin allotments that dominate Melbourne's northern suburbs often provide indomitable constraints to solar access and therefore require the production of unorthodox ideas to overcome these constraints and convert them into opportunities.

Original conditions:
The site faces north therefore relegating the backyard, the family’s primary outdoor space, to shadow throughout the year. In the 90s a two storey extension was added reducing solar access even further while creating deep dark space within the house. A family of five wished to create a long-term home, which could meet the requirements of three small children and their slow transformation into young adults over the years.

Response:
Rather than repeating past mistakes and extending from the rear in a new configuration, the proposal was to build a new structure on the rear boundary, the southern edge of the block, upon the footprint of what had been, until now, the back yard. The new structure faces the sun, the pure cantilevered box above acts as the passive solar eave, cutting out summer sun, while letting winter sun flood in.

Following the decision to build at the rear of the block a ubiquitous modern box was first imagined. Soon it seemed necessary to pursue the opportunity to activate this new, once shaded, now sunny facade. A seat along the new northern facade? Perhaps a series of steps like the Scalinata della Trinità dei Monti? But how does one lounge in the sun on steps. Perhaps a slope instead .... And the hill house evolved/emerged.

The new structure faces the original house. The backyard is now the centre of the house activated by the built form around it. Beyond solar gain, the benefit of the new structure being in the backyard is that it borrows landscaping from its neighbours’ gardens. The high windows about the entertainment cabinetry and the dining area are enveloped in trees. Internally one gets the sense that Hill House is enveloped by bush rather than part of the suburban mix.

Along one boundary a 2m high fence was created, but unlike most houses the Hill House has a one metre wide fence; a corridor lowered into the site to achieve head height. This in turn creates a lowered dining area. One rises into the living space. The change in floor level creates a bench seat for the Maynard designed ZERO WASTE TABLE.

Front Street no longer provides the main entry to the home. Family now enters via the side lane. The original house, now private dormitory spaces, no longer has a typical relationship to the N#@$%k street’s “front” door. The original house, as with most narrow blocks throughout Melbourne, demanded that visitors walked a long corridor past bedrooms to the living area. Stolen quick glances into dark private spaces always occurred along the journey. At the Hill House the entry is reorientated. The kitchen, the nerve centre, the hub of the house, is the new greeting point. Beyond is the park. Adjacent is the living space, the yard and the "kids’ house" beyond.

The old house is converted into "the kids’ house". The old house is as it once was. The rear of the simple masonry structure, though spatially connected, is not reoriented, a face is deliberately not applied. It is left honest and robust. With a restrained piece of “street art” to be applied.

Form:
Andrew is from Tasmania, a place dominated by its landscape. Built form is secondary and subservient to landscape. Melbourne is predominantly flat. Could this be why Melbourne’s architecture is adventurous? There is no landscape to confine therefore building is free to become landscape. Hill House is a response to this possibility. Melbourne is flat. If one is to explore the possibility of cantilevering off a cliff (a desire of many architects) one is forced to manufacture that landscape. A monolithic form is unsheathed from the hill and placed atop. A celebration of the synthetic, the manufactured. A simulacrum of both an undulating landscape and the pure architectural form.

You can view the construction of the Hillhouse here

Thanks to Knstruct for bringing this to my attention

A Modern Penthouse Renovation With Indoor Pool Overlooking France's Loire River.

Located on France's l'île de Nantes on the Loire river, is this wildly modern penthouse renovated by architects Avignon et Clouet.






With transparent interior walls, modules for sleeping, a retractable wall mounted staircase, an indoor pool, the 185 square meter penthouse has views from every angle.

The indoor pool:



Kitchen and Dining area:




Sleeping modules:


Living areas:


The stairwell (above and below) is wall-mounted and retractable






An overhead look at France's l'île de Nantes:

Exterior view of the building in which the penthouse is located:

Floor plans:



photos courtesy of Avignon et Clouet,Stephane Chalmeau, Philippe Ruault and Thierry Malty.