Roman Leonidov has known the customer of this project for a long time - several years ago the architect had already designed a house for him, in which the entrepreneur and his family live happily to this day. The new cottage was ordered as a commercial property, that is, as a house for sale. For these purposes, a plot of 30 acres was acquired in one of the very quiet and old (so-called "generals") settlements along the Minsk highway. And the only wish that the customer expressed for the architecture and planning of the future house was the parting word: “To sell well”. Roman Leonidov, in turn, interpreted such a short but capacious technical task as an opportunity to fully realize his ideas about a modern country house, where tradition and innovation would be combined in equal proportions.
The cottage is made up of two volumes, each of which in the plan resembles a rectangle with one removed corner or a soft sign laid "face down". The resulting "letters" are mirrored and interconnected by long beams. And in order not to have the house overly strict, Leonidov closes the "halves" volumes at a slight angle.
Functionally, such a division is more than justified: one half of the house is designed as the master's, and it contains a double-height living room with a fireplace, a dining room and a kitchen, while the second serves as a guest house, which, in addition to a bedroom and a bathroom, also has a small living room. And since the guest rooms occupy, by definition, a smaller area, the boiler room, storage rooms and a garage are located in the same volume, for which a quarter of the volume is allocated. True, the architect interpreted the dwelling of personal vehicles as an ordinary shed - according to Roman Leonidov, not everyone and not always need a warm garage, but if the future owners of the house still want to have it, it will not be difficult to build two more walls. In the gallery there is a spiral staircase leading to the second - private - floor, where, in addition to the master bedroom, there are two nurseries (one with a mezzanine).
It is important to emphasize that both volumes are placed on a wide slab - sheathed with wood on top, it serves as a comfortable summer veranda and is partially covered with a canopy. But most importantly, in this way the architect radically solved the issue of the basement. “In fact, I realized my old dream,” explains Roman Leonidov, “and designed a house without a basement. The fact is that at the negotiation stage, almost no customer wants to have a basement, but when we start making a strip foundation and, accordingly, digging a foundation pit, in a hundred cases out of a hundred, the customer becomes sorry to lose so much space, and we have to redo the finished one. project of the house, change its proportions and raise the first floor. In this case, I decided not to tempt fate and put the house on the stove - and, in my opinion, its proportions greatly benefited from this. The architect is not cunning: despite its rather impressive area (600 sq. M.), The house installed on the deck seems elegant and almost miniature. This impression is greatly enhanced by the transparent walls of the living room, which seem to have grown into a wooden platform, and the wide overhangs of the pitched roof, also sheathed with larch from the inside. And if the second volume, facing the street, consists of brutal brick and stone surfaces, then the transparent one is sewn with only a few wooden ribs and a stone frame of the chimney.
Both on the facades and in the interior of this house, the architect deliberately used only natural and, at the same time, not very expensive materials, which make it possible to strike a balance between the solidity of the external appearance and its visual lightness, as well as to make construction moderately economical.“In my opinion, in the end I got a chalet, but created by means of modern architecture,” says Roman Leonidov. - And in the workshop we call this house among ourselves "the modest charm of the bourgeoisie." The customer himself appreciated the house at its true worth - at least the sale of the cottage is out of the question, and the entrepreneur's family is preparing to move.
