The house is planned to be built in a village near Moscow. The site is a little less than a hectare, its wide side faces the road and invades the forest with a sharp triangular nose, providing the inhabitants of the future house with their own piece of nature. The house will be built along the road. The triangle will serve as a small (forest) park. The trees will not be cut down, they will put a gazebo in the depths, lay paths and everything will look like a small piece of the English park of a Central Russian estate.
This is, of course, if you look at the forest half. The house designed by the PANAK architectural bureau does just that: it stands next to the road, but turns away from it and “looks” at the pine trees. This is how many new houses near Moscow behave now: often, not being able to move away from the roads and village streets, they make the “front” facade deaf, and the park facade, turned towards the garden or, as in this case, the forest, is turned into a continuous panoramic window. Houses turn away from passing cars (and people passing by) and open up to nature. In the manor houses of the century before last, which had something, but there was plenty of space, the opposite happened: the house was far away, on some hillock, a separate road led specially to it, no one drove by, if someone was driving, then - to visit, especially here, so that the house did not turn away, he met the guests with a ceremonial portico, courtyard-courdoner, or at least a parterre with flowers. A lot of time has passed since then, and, inevitably standing next to the road, houses are forced to either fence off with a fence or turn away. Sometimes even the houses themselves turn into a fence, exposing a closed, indifferent facade on the "red line".
Here, however, the house still slightly recedes from the fence, leaving room for a narrow lawn with "alpine" stones; besides, the facade facing the street is not a blank wall at all. Strictly speaking, looking at the house from the outside, we can say that it consists of three things: white floor planes, stone wall plates and glass. The glass bends at the corners, and on the roof it even bends with two bubbles of domes (more above the winter garden and smaller above the office. The stone plates are, on the contrary, strictly rectangular. They are generously diluted with vertical stone "lattices", similar to brutal petrified blinds. All this is distributed asymmetrically along the facades, but on the wall facing the street, more stone plates and gratings gathered, and more glass appeared from the yard. It seems that now the owner will press the "smart" button - and the walls will begin to move, the gratings will close, the plates will part, like screens, and will go to the next wall. Only the "screens" are made of respectable, dense Jurassic limestone, and, of course, they cannot move. The house is too large and imposing to be mobile. I would say that it two opposite ideas have grown together: the dream-image of automated mobility (from our time) and the reality of a respectable, weighty stone (this is from eternity). A kind of petrified mechanism. this is not the essence of the project.
The house denies symmetry in every possible way. Protrusions of different depths give way to depressions, bay windows - to loggias; the walls are now thickening, now parting, and from the side of the forest, the tiers of floors suddenly begin to pile up in steps, so one might think that the house has not two floors, but more. The main entrance is located in the northern corner of the house, under a large screen-window in a concrete frame, which rests, like a TV-set on its foot, on the only pillar-column in the whole house. Even being alone and without a capital, this support turns into a hint of a portico. The hint is supported by a panel made of metal circles, here, under the ceiling, in the background (see the courtyard in the Lenin Library). All these hints are very light, almost imperceptible. In a similar way, subtly, subtly, the architects of the "mature modernism" of the seventies hinted at the classics (by the way, the kinship of that architecture and this house is felt quite sharply - of course, with all the amendments to modernity).
Entering the house past the "column", we find ourselves in the hallway, from where two main paths are outlined: along the stairs to the second floor, or directly into the winter garden. This is a long two-story hall (a British long hall comes to mind, through which one has to stroll, conducting a conversation befitting the position with guests) with a glass wall facing the forest. At one end of the hall there is an elevator and a small group of trees (the garden itself), at the opposite end there is an elegant spiral staircase, the main architectural decoration of this space. There is a table in the middle. In fact, this is a ceremonial dining room. On the right is the living room, on the left there are bedrooms (they are here surrounded by all possible amenities, and the indirect purpose of rooms with amenities is sound insulation; guests can be up to 10-15 people, and they can make noise without disturbing the owners). In the distance, on the left, there is a double-height study with a dome, in the basement below it is a cinema. Directly - the pool, surrounded by all the joys of spa life: Russian bath, sauna, hammam. In a word, the house has everything you need for dolce far niente: you don't have to leave it for days, moving from the pool to the cinema.
Or vice versa: enter, pass the vestibule, walk through the winter garden, see the “house” trees inside, behind the glass, the “wild” trees outside, and go out through the glass wall into the forest. Nothing prevents this. So it turns out that the house, with all its countless amenities, are just propylaea, a gate to enter the forest. He is also a screen, a loggia, a terrace - for contemplating the forest, a resonator house, a frame for communicating with nature. The forest is good here, and it deservedly becomes the main character and almost a neighbor. Architects, on the other hand, do everything possible to make the owners friends with their green "neighbor" - after all, this forest lived here before, even before people. How not to remember the prairie house of (ubiquitous) Wright. Only in this case - not a prairie, but a pine grove near Moscow. And I must say, symptomatically, that having taken root among the pines, the house of the American prairies has become from a simple brick - solid stone.
