The country house was built on one of the picturesque areas of the northern Moscow region. A completely flat relief without the slightest difference greatly simplified the tasks of architects - however, according to one of the authors of the project, Mikhail Kanunnikov, they were not looking for easy ways - and looking at the intricately intertwined conglomerate of volumes, lines and planes, you certainly believe in this.
The architects have been working on the project since 2008, when a future customer, seeing a house they had already built on a nearby plot, sought out its authors and asked them to design an even more outstanding building. For such a demanding customer, "The Fourth Dimension" offered an unusual solution, which, despite this, according to the authors, turned out to be very practical.
The cross-shaped plan of the house follows the precepts of Frank Lloyd Wright, who believed that every house should be based on a cross - the windows look in all directions, and a dark core does not appear in the center. The cross, however, is rather conventional and asymmetrical, according to the same Wright, who is convinced of the correctness of a practical and honest planning "from the inside out". So all the arms of the cross have different lengths, even on the second floor, and on the first floor - the volume next to the billiard room is "taken out", turned into an open terrace under the roof of the children's playroom, and the cruciform plan turns, rather, into a complex Tetris figure. The long "leg" of the cross on the second floor is occupied by the master bedroom - a spacious room with a wide loggia and a magnificent view over the roof of a small one-story bathhouse, continuing the line of the leg of the conventional cross.
On the opposite side, slightly offset from the main axis and even elongated to the side transversely to it, there is a one-story guest house with a garage, connected to the main house by a spacious terrace and above it - a deconstructivist white frame with a large rectangular opening. In the evenings, this structure, thanks to the many spotlights, well illuminates the space under it, but more interesting is that the flat roof of the second floor of the main house is made sliding above and in the rain the terrace is under the roof and between the main and guest houses you can go dry, and in sunny weather the roof can be opened like a sunroof in a car. In the depths of the site, a very small, additional barbecue veranda is hidden.
The retractable roof terrace described above is the most striking example of the outdoor recreation area of this house, but there are also many other smaller areas, under stone and wooden canopies that grow directly from the building. There are a lot of slots, ledges, loggias and terraces: the house cuts into space, throws out its large angular prominences into it - as if it enters into symbiosis, grows into the natural environment, simultaneously offering it its cubic geometric language - as a means of intermaterial communication.
In other words, a sliding roof is the apotheosis, but the house itself looks as if it began to be assembled before our eyes from several materials - stone, white concrete, glass wood, and it froze, either not curled up, or not unfolded to the end, pushing out a lot of parallelepipeds of different textures and sizes. However, all forms are functionally justified, the authors argue: in particular, each block of the main house, that is, each "sleeve" of its cross, is designed for an individual family member (two children, parents, guests). The windows of residential blocks do not look at the neighbors, only at the landscapes, avoiding even fences and construction sites in the adjacent areas - so there is no great need for curtains, they will only interfere with admiring the surroundings. By the way, each room has its own exit to one or another terrace.
For the decoration of the house, it was decided to use mainly local materials: wood and natural stone. For sandstone, the architects went to one of the old quarries, which, as it is believed, was in operation during the construction of the Church of the Intercession on the Nerl. The blank walls of the building are finished with sandstone and wood, contrasting with the transparent, all-glass ones. The central accent in the decoration was the “island wall” made of dark natural stone, facing the main (the same one under the sliding roof) terrace between the houses. The stone, contrastingly illuminated from all sides, symbolizes the family hearth.
The multi-layered facades are repeated in the interiors of the house. Built-in furniture, made to order according to the author's drawings, becomes the second skin of the building, reproducing the drawing of the outer walls inside. There are no unnecessary partitions, spaces flow into each other - Wright again! - the hall flows into the dining room, the dining room into the fireplace room, the fireplace room into the living room, from which you can go to the terrace, and then go to the guest house and garage. If any boundaries meet on the ground floor, then they are glass and not too intrusive. It is easy to walk through the house - from edge to edge, far and wide, coming up with new routes of movement. It is for this that the children of the owner of the house called him the labyrinth.
By the way, the theme of “hearth” comes up here once again - this time in connection with the real hearth, attention is inevitably focused around it - even when the hearth is surrounded by layers of zigzag-like opening stone, including a layer of translucent onyx glowing from fire. Or where the dark glass above the fireplace has been turned into a media screen.
In addition to the free and light-filled space of the first floor, there is a more private layout on the second level, where several bedrooms, playrooms and children's rooms are comfortably located. A cinema has been organized in the underground part, and the construction of the pool is currently being completed.
Talking about the project, Mikhail Kanunnikov repeatedly stressed that the main thing in this house is minimalism, pragmatism, a clear study of details: “more functions, less decoration”. And even - a house "with a masculine character." So, strict, somewhat angular; appreciates and uses technical innovations, but is not alien to the roughness of the "wild" stone. And meanwhile, in addition to a certain asceticism in details, there is one more feature here - with all its terraces, the house turned out to be very southern, open for living in nature, and from this, despite all its masculine qualities, and perhaps thanks to them - warm, in the spirit of seaside villas.
