The site on which this house will be built is quite large, but it has a whole bunch of encumbrances, therefore, when starting to work on the project, the architects were very limited from the very beginning. In particular, the building spot, despite the apparent spaciousness, was more than modest: the water protection zone and communications running through the site made possible any construction only on a narrow rectangle of land. And since the customer asked to build for him a house with an area of more than 1,500 square meters, the configuration of the volume, one might say, was predetermined in advance.
In the plan, the house is an elongated rectangle that almost completely occupies the permitted building area. As the architect himself recalls, if he had left a parallelepiped of given dimensions in this place, it would have given the customer the desired number of square meters without any problems. But the parallelepiped and the Pirogovo architectural reserve? Or, more broadly, the parallelepiped and Kuzembaev? Such a union can hardly be imagined - for this they order this architect at home in order to obtain an object of harmonious, but far from trivial form and plasticity.
In addition to a fairly large area, the customer had several other requirements for the future home. In particular, it was necessary to separate the "adult" and "children's" zones as much as possible and make the whole house very bright. This forced the architects to make glass one of the main facade materials, and use the original parallelepiped to create two independent blocks linked into a single system. In fact, Kuzembaev leaves an outer shell from the parallelepiped, into which he then implants many separate volumes. Visually, their independence is emphasized with the help of advanced consoles - “cubes” of separate rooms, three in each wing, are folded with a noticeable shift, and the space between the blocks is made entirely of glass. They are also visually separated from the outer "frame" - along the inner side walls of the parallelepiped, the architect lets open stairs, one of which directly connects the garage and the second floor of the house, and the second leads, on the contrary, to the basement.
The moat surrounding the house, through which the architect throws several bridges of different widths, helps to get rid of the feeling of the massiveness of the entire structure. The moat also has a quite utilitarian role - it makes all the rooms of the basement accessible from the street, which will allow the service personnel to get into them without entering the house. The slope should help from the accumulation of water in it, and the roof of the house itself will protect the people walking on it from precipitation - the upper crossbar of the "frame", although it is located high, but due to its dimensions will serve as a reliable canopy.
As for the functional scheme of the house, the architect fully fulfills the customer's wish to give the different generations of the same family maximum independence. In the left building, on the ground floor, there is a double-height living room and a kitchen-dining room, on the second there is a master bedroom with wardrobes and a bathroom, in the right there is a garage for 2 cars and technical rooms, and above them are rooms for children. The glass volume that unites them also has two floors plus a basement: in the basement there is a swimming pool, on the ground floor there is an entrance area with an atrium, a corridor and dressing rooms, and on the second there are guest bedrooms and master offices.
Initially, Kuzembaev planned to make panoramic glazing in all bedrooms, inserting a stained-glass window into each of the "cubes", but the relative proximity to the road to which the house also faces from the front, forced the architect to find a more sophisticated solution for facing the main facade. As a result, the stained-glass windows consist of glass and wooden squares alternating in a checkerboard pattern, picking up and developing at the micro level the theme of the same square consoles. And in the central part, which is completely glazed, the role of "black cells" is played by frosted glass, which, on the one hand, creates the lightest possible space inside the house, and on the other hand, reliably protects it from the eyes of strangers.
On the back side of the house, facing the reservoir, the situation is completely different - here transparent surfaces definitely dominate. Enclosed in elegant wooden frames, they reflect the surrounding landscape, making the home look like a gallery of ever-changing wildlife paintings. Moreover, due to the difference in relief, the architect from this side managed to fully open the basement - in the summer the pool located here turns into an outdoor pool. Rooted in the landscape, the house is continued by a series of open terraces descending steps to the water and connecting them by stairs without any fences or railings.
I must say that fences are a topic that is not very familiar to this house at all. Of course, there are protective structures on the balconies of the second floor, on the porch and above the moat, but they are all made of tempered glass, which the architect does not even frame with anything. The pavilion for cars is also covered with the same transparent casing - glass surfaces are barely distinguishable against the background of its wooden lattice walls. By introducing such a quantity of glass into the project, as well as replacing, where possible, dull wooden surfaces with lathing, Totan Kuzembaev achieves not only the incredible visual lightness of this rather large house, but also the unity of the complex composition. It is no coincidence that the architect himself calls this project "House-honeycomb" - assembled from separate cells, it looks whole and harmonious.
