The famous Bullfinches are located not far from Istra, in a hilly and wooded area. The plot purchased for the construction of a private house was no exception: there are many pine trees growing on it, and the relief has a strong drop. On the one hand, this created additional difficulties for the designers, but on the other hand, the large area of the territory and the presence of a natural fence in the form of trees on it reliably protected the future home from the eyes of strangers. And that is why the architects were able to make the house as open as possible to nature and the world. Creeping along the ground, it repeats the plasticity of the site's relief and becomes its integral part. The architects admit that they designed the house in such a way that it is as different as possible from traditional urban housing. In particular, from almost every room of it, be it a living room on the first floor or bedrooms on the second, you can go directly to the site.
“The layout of the house is based on the principle of flowing space, discovered by Mies van der Rohe,” says the author of the project, Vladislav Platonov. “But if the famous architect had the interior space of the house“flowing”, then in this case, both the interior of the object and its exterior develop according to this principle." The house cuts into the existing slopes with numerous terraces, so that one gets the feeling as if it "crumbled" over the hilly territory into separate, but similar elements. This impression is reinforced by the unusual construction of the roof: the traditional gable roof seems to be torn into several segments, "pulled apart" into different ends of the elongated living space. And in order to fit the building into the relief as much as possible, the architects not only laid out lawns on the operated roof (in particular, the garage), but also planted bushes and even trees. “Our house is assembled from separate mise-en-scenes, each of which is not like the others, since it is“cut”exactly in place. By the way, not a single tree was cut down during the construction, the house "fit" between them. Every time some movement of the relief, vegetation dictated their own laws, and thanks to the individual set of landscape details, another detail was born,”says the author of the project.
The architectural image of the house is made up of a combination of natural wood and light stone. In particular, its base is made of porous foam concrete, and this material, which has successfully replaced limestone traditional for white-stone Moscow, the architects did not plaster or somehow finish, but only in some places decorated with carvings or grinded under a rocky surface. Special impregnations protect the surface of the foam blocks from moisture, but at the same time do not prevent them from letting in air, thanks to which the walls of the house "breathe" so effectively that he did not even need an air conditioning system.
The main material of the supporting frame of the house was selected especially durable pine timber LVL, and for the decoration of the house a heat-treated pine board was chosen. Interestingly, all the wooden parts were coated with oils without a UV filter, due to which the color of the wood is constantly changing, gradually blurring. For example, on the sunny side, it has already burnt out so much that it practically does not differ in color from foam blocks. The authors of the project were counting on just such an effect - the house, the base of which is overgrown with moss, and the walls fade, gradually mimics the surrounding landscape. “Such a house does not require maintenance, it does not need to be tinted or restored,” says Vladislav Platonov. - I myself call this technique “denim architecture”. Just as jeans gradually wiping away from active socks look much more attractive than new ones, so a living, “fading” house, on the one hand, acquires its bright individual character, and on the other, it becomes an integral part of the site."
The interior layout of the house, as already mentioned, is also subject to the principle of spaces flowing into each other. The central core of the public area consists of a billiard room, a fireplace and a library; the living room smoothly passes into the area of the kitchen, dining room and auxiliary utility rooms. In the left wing there are guest bedrooms and a sauna block, on the second floor there are master bedrooms, dressing rooms and bathrooms. The interior design develops the ideas laid down in the architectural concept. The entrance area is accentuated by the rocky surface of the wall made of natural stone, and the main theme of the interior design is glued pine beams, whose rich natural texture is emphasized by impregnations of different colors - from honey and light green to chocolate and wine-burgundy. A pendant fireplace resembling a spaceship is placed against the background of a wedge-shaped window, and in this unusual combination, as in a drop of water, the essence of the concept of a house is reflected, the whole image of which is built on the contrast of forms and materials.