Interior progressing

Over the last 2 weeks work has been ongoing on the interior.  First the electrics and water pipes were installed, along with the metal frames that wall-hung sinks and toilets would be mounted on.  After this the underfloor heating was laid. 

 

This first photo shows the heating laid in the ground floor.  In the centre are the walls surrounding the 4m bank of floor-to-ceiling storage units which allow us to keep the rooms clear from clutter.  To the left is the dining area leading on to kitchen with it’s low wall which will serve to simplify the view.

The second  photo shows the view from the bathroom to the main bedroom.  On this floor we have created floor-to-ceiling doors to emphasise a continual, flowing space.  This is heightened by the full-height wall that encloses the staircase, emphasising the vertical.  There are no light switches along this path, removing all needless decoration.

On top of these heating pipes the concrete sub-floors will be laid. 

The house standing

As soon as the walls were up the house was sealed, with tiling and windows going on quickly.  At this stage the walls were all standing for the main house.   The garage, which needs the scaffolding to be removed to be built, would be constructed later.

The next major stage for the outside would be the cladding, however Christmas was coming and with it a long break.  

 

The Christmas break (3 weeks for the builders) proved ideal.  The house needed to dry, and as can be seen from the following photo, the open cellar had attracted a lot of water (and a decent algae population). 

 

Putting it up

When all walls had been built in the workshop they were craned into position over a 3 day period in early December 07. Here is the main bedroom wall being put in…    

  

Internal walls are put in place at the same time, there seemed to be almost no additional finishing to fit – they just fit as expected.  Another demonstration of Swiss precision.     

 Looking from the main bedroom to the bathroom, with no top floor…

Constructing the walls

The house was going to be pre-fabricated and then constructed on site.  The building firm cut and constructed the walls in their workshops about 10km away.  Our electrician visited during this time and installed channels for cabling to go through into the walls.

The first image shows working on the walls.  There was considerable accuracy involved, with the cut patterns developed from the CAD files.  This is the upper floor  one with solitary window for the bathroom.

 

The walls were made in complete lengths.  The following photo shows 3 of the 12 metre external walls waiting for cabling and insulation.

 

Another cellar photo

A photo of the cellar doing an impression of a secret Swiss military bunker…   

The design process

Design was a long, often frustrating iterative process. Our architect, whom I believe we’ve developed a good working relationship with, helped translate our, often strong ideas into a technically feasible solution. As the design progressed he was able to grasp what we wanted to achieve and knew instinctively what we were likely to appreciate.

As mentioned, the external walls with openings were (almost) given and inside the staircase to the cellar was already built – it made sense to build further staircases above this. There was also a need for 2 columns on each floor. I had a strong desire to hide these. Minimalism itself couldn’t be the theme. What we did was think of how the house could function, what we wanted to emphasise and what we wanted to hide. In particular we thought of the views as someone moved through the house – how could we create destinations that could be explained with single objects and how could we use the walls to frame these and exaggerate the distances.The other aspect was the need to hide everything which wasn’t essential. To do this we realised we needed to create large volumes of storage and for this storage to be ‘invisible’ it needed to be seen as thick walls.

The ground floor concept came quickly. We defined two navigational axis and used these to create a floor plan which I believe is self evident in how the space will be used.

The first floor, or first and second caused many more problems. In the end, after many revisions we reverted back to the simplicity of the ground floor and created a design which solved all our problems with considerable flair.

With a pre-fab house like we were creating all the design decisions need to be done before construction. After spending from June to September getting the floor plans right we then spent September and October ‘filling in the gaps’, defining things such as what each cupboard would hold, whether we could get away with no handles (I thought that they were needless decoration), exact positioning of electricity points etc.

The construction started of the walls in mid November.

The first photo

The first image of the house, as it was when we found it.The cellars of all 5 houses had been constructed.  The first house was standing.  This was June 2007. 

Some thoughts on the what we wanted to achieve

Brief:  As a young family we wanted a house with a garden where our 2 year old could grow up, with place to let family / friends stay when they visit.  I wanted an office, though this could be combined with a guest room.  It was to be easy to maintain, reasonably environmentally friendly and feel spacious without necessarily be large.

After time searching, in vain, for a reasonably priced / placed piece of land we found an architect who was developing 5 houses in one of our preferred locations.  He had got planning permission but was giving flexibility on internal layout (could do pretty much anything as long as it didn’t change the outside or affect the structural elements).  In this way we saw it in a similar way to a loft.  We felt he was offering 80% of what we wanted with the option of getting closer.

The external box of the house is approx 12m by 6m with a full sized cellar (one room with a window).  It is wood construction, built by a local firm in their workshops and then constructed on site.  It will be clad in larch, untreated therefore going silver over time.  Cellar was built when we agreed and is concrete.  It has references to the local wooden agricultural buildings which we liked. 

Location: Countryside of Canton Zurich in a small village.  Built on an old orchard in the centre of the village surrounded by old farmhouses (see header).  It’s a particularly sensitive location and planning was long, difficult and, in true Swiss sense, highly participative (lots of the external details like the crosses on the windows were specified). 

Design:  We wanted a minimal house where everything that didn’t need to be in view was out of sight.  We also wanted to reduce the visual clutter to a minimum.  One of my criteria was that the rooms would be right if you could imagine putting a Donald Judd sculpture in the centre of the room on its own.  My wife errors on the side of a bit more comfort – but both of us seem to think that most of what gets put in books on minimal architecture ‘is a bit fussy’. 

A story of a house

This is going to be the story of our new house.  After 4.5 years of living in wonderful, rented contemporary architecture we wanted to build something ourselves.This blog will tell the story of that house, built on an old orchard in the company of the old farm-houses shown on the header.