Ofis, one of the most famous architectural firms of modern Slovenia, is not by hearsay familiar with the genre of social housing - it was they who, in particular, built the "Apartments on the Beach" complex in Izola, which became a finalist of the European Union architectural award "Mies van der Rohe Prize". The new project of the bureau also belongs to the category of low-budget buildings, although this time we are talking about private suburban housing.
The settlement, designed in the suburb of Podpec, has a planning structure traditional for Slovenian settlements. All households are "strung" on the axis of the main street, from which small branch ramps lead to the plots. The architects themselves compare such a scheme with a circulatory system or a ridge, which is why they called their project Backbone Village.
The area of each cottage is 110 square meters. On the ground floor there is a living room with access to the garden, a dining room and a kitchen. The architects also included in the ground floor plan the possibility of creating an additional room, for example, a guest bedroom or study. The second floor is completely reserved for the bedrooms of the inhabitants of the house - there are three of them in total - as well as bathrooms and dressing rooms. Each bedroom has access to a larch-clad terrace decorated with a pergola. It should be noted that this rectangular volume, embedded in a traditional house with a gable roof and overhanging the panoramic windows of the living room with an impressive console, is the most spectacular architectural element of the entire composition.
There are 8 houses in the village. It is assumed that their main buyers will be young families who cannot afford housing in the city center, but are eligible for a mortgage loan with a low interest rate. The cost of each house is 140-160 thousand euros without interior decoration.
A. M.
