"I look at this house and understand that I cannot live in it!" - with these words a future customer came to the ADM bureau. The mansion, which looks more like a reduced model of a medieval castle with many towers, he acquired, first of all, because of the convenient location and the presence of developed infrastructure in the village, but at first he thought that one could somehow come to terms with the architecture that was not in favor. But it quickly became clear that the exaggerated copy of the castle did not at all correspond to the tastes and needs of a business person at the beginning of the 21st century, so it was decided to reconstruct and turn the mansion into an aesthetically attractive, functional and comfortable home for permanent residence outside the city.
The architects have developed three different reconstruction options, each of which develops the idea of a country house in its own way. It is important that in each of them the structural scheme of an already constructed building was taken as a basis - the architects were interested in exploring it from the point of view of form creation, and this approach guaranteed significant cost savings to the customer.
The first version of the reconstruction provided for the transformation of the "castle" into a mansion with a hipped roof in the style of "Prairie Houses" by Frank Lloyd Wright. From the pompous building, the architects left only a brick parallelepiped, to which small wooden volumes were attached.
The second option is a house consisting of three cubes made in different materials: brick, fiberglass and wood. The authors themselves liked this option most of all, however, as Andrei Romanov, head of the ADM bureau, admits, from the very beginning they had doubts about whether they were building a house or still a museum of modern architecture.
The third reconstruction option, which the customers ultimately preferred, also uses the technique of combining cubic volumes, this time one- and two-story. The structural scheme of the existing mansion, as already mentioned, has been left unchanged, however, the hip roofs are replaced by the architects with flat ones, the bay windows are cut off, and the interior space will be completely redesigned for the needs of the new owners. And this changes the appearance of the cottage so radically that, comparing its photographs before reconstruction and 3D visualization after, it is most difficult to believe that this is one and the same house.
The center of the composition of the renovated mansion is the winter garden - a two-story glass prism, opened onto the adjacent territory. On the lower level there is a living room with a fireplace, on the upper level there is a library. The transparent volume is intended not only to improve the insolation characteristics of the premises, but also to emphasize the open character of the renovated house. In addition, the massive glass "inset" creates a very interesting contrast between materials and open and closed spaces. All other facades are clad in light wood, the visual lightness of which is balanced by the belts of natural stone that frame the roof.
All three options for house reconstruction are united by the presence of an elongated one-story extension to it. The appearance of this volume is explained by two reasons at once: the customers wanted to have a free-standing bathhouse, and the architects were looking for a way to better integrate the house into a site where not a single tree grows and there are no additional buildings. The “castle” in the middle of this wasteland looked like a completely foreign object, but the wood-sheathed cubes seem to grow out of the ground - first one-story, then two-story.
The annex houses the bathhouse itself and the pool, to which the volume owes its elongated rectangular shape. It is united with the main house by a terrace with a roof but no walls. Such "permeability" of this transition makes the whole structure visually light and almost transparent, likening it to a gazebo, which was so lacking in this area. There will be a small garden on the roof of the terrace, to which the panoramic glazing of the bedroom is facing.
With this project, the ADM bureau managed to prove that even illiquid buildings of the post-Soviet gigantomania era have a future. With the help of simple architectural techniques, their appearance can not only be modernized, but radically changed. And considering that reconstruction is always cheaper than demolishing and building a new house from scratch, then the ADM project can also be considered an excellent anti-crisis proposal.
