This amazing home looks like an elegant greenhouse in the garden, accidentally untouched by the construction fever of the metropolis. It was conceived in the old center of Moscow, on Ostozhenka, half-strangled by construction. The tiny plot bought by the customer in Khilkov Lane is sandwiched between the new 6-storey building of the Barkli company and the car park at the back of the Turgenevs' estate. The site could easily be classified as hopeless, but the opposite happened - the abundance of difficulties became a powerful incentive for the professionalism of the developer and architect.
Until recently, there was a two-storey outbuilding in this place, spoiled by endless restructuring and dilapidated. It was not of architectural value, in contrast to the central house of the Turgenevs' estate - a typical mansion of the Moscow Empire style. Here, at the end of Ostozhenka far from the center, there are still several houses of Russian classicism, and therefore there is still a faint hint of Polenov's "Moscow courtyard" - the touching courtyard and garden spirit of a Moscow city estate.
It was the context of the quarter, genius loci, that determined the first fundamental parameters of the project: rejection of architectural expansion upward and in breadth, creation of a residential facility with the condition that the city would return as much air, grass and trees as possible - those unconditional urban values that were characteristic of the old one-story buildings. In general, as Skuratov himself jokes, there was only one way left: "up the stairs leading down to the underground reserves of the city space."
The idea cannot be called completely new. Fairy tales of the peoples of the world described incredible underground palaces in every way - from the Labyrinth of King Minos to the magnificent puppet theater in the dungeon of Pope Carlo. But magical underground palaces created by the rich literary imagination of the past, in modern architectural reality, as a rule, turn into a standard set of infrastructure services that are relatively easy to "bury in the ground": basements, warehouses, boiler rooms, tunnels, garages, at best, wine cellars. cinemas and billiard rooms.
Literally, examples are not far away: monumental cellars and underground garages - under the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, under residential buildings in Molochny and Butikovsky - have become a routine construction practice.
However, here, in the new project of Sergei Skuratov, we are dealing with a completely new typology of an urban residential building. The project offers a radically new solution not only for the internal living space, but for the entire system of relationships between the house and the city. The underground part of the villa is many times larger than the external volume. Having practically returned a free and green area to the city, it leaves it with only a few fundamentally important vital functions - the entrance and entrance to the house, as well as a huge, almost redundant source of light and air.
The external volume also lacks the traditional features of a house - doors, windows, blank walls and roofs. The door replaces a slab with a pivot in the middle. The stove rotates around the rod-axis, opening and closing the entrance to the garage and the entrance to the house. The entire surface of the external volume is conceived of alternating plates of tempered glass and specially treated thin greenish marble.
Thus, the outer pavilion of the underground villa serves as both an entrance and a skylight. Every plane of it lets in daylight. The asymmetry of the slopes and edges of the roof made of rare materials used for the first time in Moscow makes the whole structure akin to the work of a sculptor or jeweler. Sergey Skuratov describes the carefully planned effect as follows: “In the daytime outside, the greenish color of stone and glass will merge into a complex and glittering texture impenetrable to the eye. Due to the general green hue, in summer the one-story volume will almost merge with the trees of the site, in winter the graphics of marble veins will resonate with the pattern of black tree branches. And inside, the refracted daylight will create the atmosphere of an illuminated garden, as in the paintings of the French impressionists."
Three underground floors are designed in the same materials and, most importantly, in the same "garden and suburban" style, which completely rejects any basement associations. The first, or rather the minus-first floor, is closest to daylight and therefore residential. The living room is located in the center, the ceiling above it is cut and lets light in from the entrance volume of the upper house - "lantern". In the courtyard, level with the ground, three more glass planes are conceived - to the left and to the right of the "lantern" house. One of them illuminates the children's rooms, the other is located above the shower room, and finally, the largest "window in the ground" is intended for the winter garden, conceived in the second underground tier. On the ground floor, there is no floor above the garden so that the light can pass unimpeded, and so that residents and guests can admire the trees from the living room balcony.
Minus - the second floor is entirely devoted to recreation, sports and entertainment. On the one hand, there is a garden, on the other, a swimming pool, saunas, solariums, fitness and more. They are separated by a glass wall - transparent to allow light to pass through, but not steam from the water part to the garden part, so as not to harm the plants. The pool wall is made of the same translucent stone, illuminated from the inside. Thus, from the side of the living room and the pool, there are two double-height spaces: the living room and the winter garden, parallel, but displaced one relative to the other in height and therefore not merged into one, but as if touching and flowing into one another.
In both residential tiers, asymmetric horizontal glass "windows" in the floor-ceilings are thought out. Daylight, thus gradually dissolving, penetrates to the second tier and builds up in the likeness of light wells that transmit and distribute light. From this, the tiers become permeable, the space becomes light, flowing and airy.
The third floor is a technical one, in it, in addition to life support systems, a garage for 8 cars, connected to the surface by an elevator, and rooms for security.
Obviously, we have before us a solid and carefully thought out example of a new architectural typology - a large and luxurious urban villa, buried under the ground in the very center of the city. Is this a forced decision? In a sense, of course, yes. Sergei Skuratov is well aware of the problems of the city: “It is difficult to find open space, fresh air and beautiful views in Moscow now. Above, from the level of the penthouses, a motley and by no means harmonious panorama of the metropolis opens up. And at the level of grass and trees, unfortunately, there is almost no air, no grass, no trees.
The modern city forces us to reconsider traditional approaches and solutions. I think that we offered the city not the most usual, probably unexpected, but mutually beneficial and fruitful exchange of space."
It is not the first time that Sergey Skuratov has presented bold and new architectural solutions to the city's judgment. It is important that this project is also solid, clean and absolutely verified, supported by precise modern knowledge and solutions in the field of materials and technologies. And, in the end, it perfectly matches the ideas of Pinocchio, Pierrot and other great poets and dreamers: “The first thing they saw when they got through the hole was the diverging rays of the sun. They fell from the ceiling through a round window ….
