The customer immediately defined his wishes for the future dwelling very clearly: it should be a log house, but a modern one. Moreover, the modern client meant not only the architectural style of the building, but also its layout - in particular, a bright multifunctional space should have become the center of internal life, and outside the house had to be supplemented with a garage, spacious terraces and a swimming pool. “The task immediately struck me as interesting, because the customer was sincerely fascinated by the style of log houses, but he made demands on his own dwelling that were basically incompatible with the typology of the hut,” says Roman Leonidov. "In order to translate these wishes into reality, we had to develop an unusual constructive scheme and very carefully approach the issue of the layout of the house."
In terms of the plan, the house is a rather complex figure - the letter "S" laid on its side, which is formed by rectangles of rooms with different areas of purpose. The central space of the first floor, as the customer wanted, is a huge living-dining room, through which you can get to the study, the guest room, the sauna, as well as the stairs leading to the second floor. The upper level is reserved for the owners' personal premises - a bedroom, a dressing room, a nursery, as well as a billiard room and a library. To the long crossbar of the letter "S", oriented along the east-west axis, is attached another perpendicular "tail" - a garage and an entrance zone that unites the two volumes. The porch and the appendix of the garage are facing north, and most of the interior spaces are oriented towards the south, from which the architects attach several large terraces to the house, and between them an outdoor pool is inscribed.
It is interesting that the terraces receive rooms not only on the first floor, but also on the second - wide balconies are supported by wooden supports of a square cross-section. These extremely laconic designs are especially striking in contrast to the large-diameter rounded log from which the walls of the house itself are folded. Probably, they would have looked completely alien to each other, if not for the stained-glass windows, which maximally open the house to daylight and the sun. The glazed planes are so large-scale that they visually displace the brutal log walls - one glance at the facades of the house is enough to understand that the logs folded into the floor play here by no means the main constructive role. However, this is not a decoration either - everything is honest, as Roman Leonidov says, just the blockhouse in this case became just a part of the constructive scheme. In fact, the architect took a traditional hut and enlarged it to a size that allows him to easily accommodate all the functions the customer needs.
The walls were pushed apart with vertical and horizontal beams. Made of timber, they form a lattice, the cells of which the architect fills with either stained-glass windows or the same tree. As a result, on the facades made of the same material, there are completely different textures - volumetric convex logs with protruding ends are unexpectedly replaced by a flat surface of the timber, which Leonidov camouflages with a thin strip. It is with such vertical shading that the under-roof space is decorated - this visually separates the traditional gable roof from the traditional log wall and thereby further enhances the feeling that arose at the very beginning: the hut, which became the prototype for this house, was split into separate components that the architect managed more than at ease. In confirmation of this, Leonidov makes a separate roof for the part of the house in which the bedrooms and the attic are located: the developed outriggers reliably protect the terraces from the midday sun, and the high ridge gives this thoroughly modern volume an archetypal appearance.
And if the southern side of the living room is made completely transparent, then to the north, to the main entrance and the road passing nearby, the architect turns the facade-screen. On the one hand, Leonidov did not want to make this part of the cottage deaf, on the other hand, he had to protect the main space of the house from accidental views from the street. A non-trivial solution was found: this is how the architect moves apart a regular five-wall with the help of a frame, he also moves apart the logs of a single wall, replacing some of the cylinders with transparent inserts. These glazed strips get different widths, thanks to which the wall turns into an intricate puzzle, through which the greenery surrounding the house from the opposite side shines through, and at night the lights of someone else's life flicker, without violating its privacy.
Deliberately avoiding stylizations, Roman Leonidov relied on the continuity of the use of architectural elements characteristic of rural buildings of the past, and, following the taste preferences of the customer, the functional program and the desire to combine the exterior and interior as much as possible, he built a house in which the features of traditional log structures were organically intertwined with artistic and constructive techniques of modern architecture.
