This forested area is located quite far from Moscow and in general from civilization, silence reigns here, and the customer, turning to Roman Leonidov for a project of a country house, wanted his new housing to become flesh from the flesh of a picturesque natural environment. That is why the customer saw his architectural solution as extremely functional, simple and non-pathetic - this is how he formulated the terms of reference at the first meeting with the future author of the project. As Roman Leonidov himself says, he developed several options for the project of the house, of which the customer chose the most rigorous, devoid of any expressive plastic elements. “At first it seemed to me that a person wastedly refusing expressive solutions, but the more time I spent on the site itself, among the age-old pines, the more I agreed with the client,” recalls the architect.
The self-sufficient verticals of the trees growing on the site are opposed by Leonids to a horizontally oriented composition. And if the garage is treated as a separate one-story "cube", then the architect gives the residential part a more complex geometry. It cuts a concrete parallelepiped into the main two-story volume, which is faced, like the garage, with a larch board, at the level of the first floor. Its brutality (especially against a background of wood) is compensated by a large number of windows, both panoramic and in the form of narrow cracks, as well as snow-white plaster. In this insert, the architect places the living-dining room, and uses its roof to create a terrace on the second floor. In order for all the premises of the upper level to get their place for outdoor recreation, Roman Leonidov maximally extends the floor slab, and in order to differentiate the terraces into "children" and "adults", introduces an additional vertical wall. The final architectonic chord is the displacement of the horizontal slab so that with its free edge it captures the roof of the garage, and an expressive console appears on the façade on the reverse side. At the first glance at the house, it seems that this displacement has remained unrecorded - having entered the garage territory, the snow-white slab seems to float above it, although in fact the impression is deceiving: the architect misses thin supports between the base of the terrace and the roof of the technical volume.
This shift not only adds dynamism to the entire composition, but also plays an important functional role, helping to create a covered passage between the main house and the garage. Thanks to this solution, an already rather small house (300 sq.m. together with a garage) visually seems even more fragmented, "stretched" over the site and therefore even more successfully integrated into the landscape: trees and shrubs are not only reflected in its numerous windows, but also seem to break through it. By the way, it is from this impromptu gallery that the entrance to the house is organized. As Roman Leonidov explains, he thus killed two birds with one stone: he very clearly articulated the entrance zone on the main facade of the house and at the same time avoided any pretentiousness in its design. In fact, this passage, which connects the street and back yards of the house, serves as its front door, the simplicity and naturalness of which is designed to emphasize the wooden paneling. All terraces of the first floor are sheathed with exactly the same board, and if the upper terraces receive fences in accordance with safety regulations, then the ground ones are devoid of them at all - they are separated from the site by only two or three steps, which are closely surrounded by greenery in summer.
As already mentioned, the main facade material here has become a larch board, which now still shines with the honey tint of a freshly prepared tree, but over time will change its color to silver-gray and actually merge with the trunks of the pine trees surrounding the house. In addition to glass and concrete, which also became full components of the architectural image of this object, Roman Leonidov also used brick in it - a wall of this material fixes the rear facade of the cottage, as if balancing the expression of the white block of the living room.
An important role in the appearance of the house is played by the window bays, made of thin bog oak slats. The fact is that one of the obligatory conditions of the customer was the ability to close all the windows. It was very difficult to implement this requirement with the help of traditional shutters, taking into account the total glazing area, therefore the architect preferred their modern automatic counterparts. Their chocolate surface is organically combined with the wood cladding of the house, and with the brown-burgundy shade of bricks, and the horizontal arrangement of the slats is supported by thin steel cables used as the fence of the upper terraces. When the windows are open, the blinds are perceived as a decorative element of the facade decoration - in the "sheathed" form, they create an additional ephemeral shell that reliably protects housing from the sun and the views of outsiders and at the same time does not create a feeling of deaf armor, which is perfectly combined with the democratic nature of this the object as a whole.
