Floorplans

I’ve mentioned before about some of the design constraints that we had when designing the house. The house had been designed essentially as a shell (like a loft or many modern hotels) and therefore our design work was almost exclusively limited to the interior. The house is in a sensitive zone in the centre of an old village which seriously restricted what could and couldn’t be done – exterior planning permission to 18 months are was very strict.

We had originally been thinking of building completely from scratch and had been searching for a plot. We were keen on a wooden building done in a modern way. I suppose we had thoughts on some of the modern wooden houses around the Bodensee, especially in Austria, the local barns and buildings such as Chipperfield’s Rowing museum which picks up on similar wooden local agricultural architecture.

The current local building style is either the white cube or the white cube with a sloping roof, neither of which has much precedent in the traditional Swiss building. Given that they are churned out by builders they mostly are pretty traditional buildings clothed with a modernist aesthetic, placed unlovingly in the landscape. Our conversations regarding our initial plan had meant that we had already defined what we wanted:

• Simplicity in line – large, continuous forms with an absence of decoration or interruption
• Clearly defined zones for functions (eating, sitting, sleeping etc)
• Open where feasible but also closed to enable privacy for the family as it developed. Noise reduction meant doors were in
• Storage built in, partly as we’d lived in houses without decent storage, and partly because by building in the storage we could avoid putting furniture in the rooms, which would break the lines
• Clarity of views. We both thought of buildings where part of the joy was transitioning through rooms which were directional and then moving into open spaces where the eye was free to roam.

The constraints we had on the interior included:

• The staircase to basement was fixed, and for efficient layout it made sense to put the one to the first floor above it
• There needed to be two pillars to support the beams in the ground floor
• The windows and front door were fixed in location (we did take one window out so as to improve the interruption on one wall)

The pillars were unwelcome so we then sought to cover them.

 

 

The ground floor plan came quite quickly. The principle we looked at was two long views, first from the front door, uninterrupted to the garden (where we’d plan a tree to draw the eye) and the other along the building. We then used a wall to coach the eye in these directions, parallel with the staircase. This became the obvious place for storage and for control of the environment (where we’d hide the electrical sockets etc). It runs along the building, approximately for 4m, then there is a gap of approx 1m for the view from front door to garden and to provide access to the kitchen, then it extends through the kitchen to the far wall.The cross elements, namely the kitchen emphasise the horizantal. The use of a dwarf wall facing the dining area reduces the visibility of the clutter of the items on the worksurfaces (when cooking, when not they will be clear) and the top cupboards on the far wall will start at the ceiling and come down, again creating a single horizantal line parallel to the dwarf wall.

A decent sized toilet room is created.

 

The first floor was much harder to plan. The position of the bathroom wasn’t fixed, but it made most sense where it is. It is on the North side of the building and the window here is smaller. We were able, like in the ground floor toilet, to use milk glass.We wanted to create 3 bedrooms and permanent access to the attic. We wanted to maximise the amount of storage whilst minimising the number of lines. In the end we decided to use a similar layout to the ground floor and use thick ‘furniture’ walls of storage creating simple rectangular bedrooms. All bedrooms are big enough to have a double bed, and as there is ample space, a bed is the only thing necessary in each room.The connecting corridor is one of my favourite spaces in the building due to it’s simplicity. We decided to use a full height, rather than dwarf wall over the staircase creating two tall thin spaces, we also decided to enclose the staircase to the attic inside a cupboard. There is more shared-usage storage here.  

Neighbours

As mentioned earlier, the zone where the house is being built is protected – in the centre of the village, on a slope, surrounded by old farm buildings.  This imposed a far more traditional design on the outside of the building.  The neighbours can clearly be seen on this shot.

 

Fortunately these design restrictions weren’t necessary on the inside.  The minimalism of the interior has references on the outside – the cladding can be seen as modern in it’s precision – but the traditional features dilute the effect.  In the end the design keeps its inner calm to itself.

Costs and work prioritisation

It seems that if you ask any homebuilder what they remember about the build then costs, or at least previously unexpected costs come to mind. I guess it’s also one of the deterrents for people considering building – it’s really hard to go into the project knowing how much it’s going to cost.

I think most cost changes can be separated into 2 main camps – unexpected costs due to material price changes / project complications and costs added because of design changes. Of the latter these can be subdivided into changes pre-project sign-off and those when the build has started. The latter always are surprisingly expensive and ideally should be avoided. Saying that, both my wife and I, used to project management as part of our jobs, so know the likely effect of ’scope creep’. Our changes have predominately been done pre-signoff.

Where we’ve added additional costs has been due to three main areas:

• A desire to move from residential quality materials to commercial quality with the aim of reducing long-term ownership costs
• To add extra functionality, usually reducing the need for purchasing furniture to do a job (e.g. storage designed as part of the scheme rather than as furniture placed in the room.) I guess converting the attic into a usable room would fall in this category.
• A few design aspects – e.g. our commissioning a lighting designer or specifying custom-made doors.

The latter changes can generally be grouped as costs to take things away rather than add them. The technical aspects or craftsmanship needed to do things simply is a real eye-opener. Being determined in the level you want the details is one of the hardest challenges we have faced. At the moment we’ve compromised in a few places, but done so knowingly. There is an underlying feeling that details that we’d appreciate, would cost a lot, but would be unnoticed by others were too extravagant for a house which must be realistically costed in terms of the local market. If this was a house that we built as our long-term home maybe some decisions would be different.

The other issue that we’ve faced is that the project is far more highly interdependent than we’d assumed. This has made prioritisation difficult. As an example, we decided that at some stage we’d like to plaster the attic. We had this as something we’d like to do in the medium term, however to get the plasterboard to the attic was best done by craning it in place before the roof went on (access is tight through the ladder-like staircase), therefore there were pressures to do this early on. There have been many, many other similar scenarios The implication is that this makes phasing the build an unattractive and difficult activity.

So what is the outcome of all this? Well, the house itself will be closer to the end-goal when we move in than we previously expected. At the same time, some things, such as custom furniture, is being pushed back as we’ve had to use allocated budget for more permanent items. In the end the total budget will be about the same as we expected, just that phases have been led far more by technical considerations than we thought.

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.

 

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.