The history of the construction of the Novy Svet cottage community, three kilometers from the Moscow Ring Road along the Altufevskoe highway, and the history of this building began at the same time. Over the years that have passed since that moment, the village has become one of the symbols of the ideal country life of the early 2000s: houses with mezzanines and tiled roofs, green lawns, properly planned well-groomed flower beds, a lake, a forest … But this is what is usually called residential areas. In addition to cottages, an entrance group was to appear on a small square avant-site of a suburban paradise - eight thousand square meters of a multifunctional center “for insiders”: shops, a restaurant, a fitness club with two swimming pools and hotel rooms. The public center with a quiet elite village turned out to be not very much in demand and it turned out that the building, unfinished in 2006, was completed by the architects only now, having chosen, at the request of the customer, architectural solutions optimal for the budget.
It was required not only to reconstruct the surviving skeleton, but above all to rethink its purpose. There were plenty of ideas. Alexey Ivanov recalls how for almost half a year they were looking for a new optimal solution for the transformation and practical use of the existing space: they selected functions, changed the composition of the premises. An idea was considered to completely demolish the frame and build the complex from scratch - but it turned out to be both more difficult and more expensive.
Ultimately, the wisest idea was to keep the framework as much as possible. From a public center it has turned into an apart-hotel with a fairly flexible planning structure - for example, several apartments with an area of 30-40 square meters are arranged within one section in such a way that, if desired, they can be combined into one large apartment. The most spacious and expensive ones are located in the corners of the building, where natural light penetrates deep inside. A significant part of the first and underground floors is given to public functions and a parking lot for residents' cars, which leads to a beautiful long passage that runs into the light atrium space of the staircase and elevator hall.
Located in the center of the building, the circular atrium is inherited from the previous project; it made it possible to give apartments, located in a wide and deep volume of the building, both the required amount of daylight and a new quality of the environment. In addition, the atrium, going down to the parking floor, gave grace not only to the ground, but also to the underground entrance.
The exterior of the building has also radically changed: over the surviving volume, the customer asked to build two more floors. Technically, this task could be realized with minimal cost - simply by strengthening the structures. But from the point of view of the restrictions in force on the site, a paradoxical problem arose: with a permitted height of 19 meters, only a four-story building was allowed to be built. Less is possible, more is not possible. Under such conditions, all rooms should have been about five meters high, which is quite absurd. But, abandoning the ceremonial and disproportionately grandiose first floor, the architects proposed to make three standard ones, turning the fourth six-meter-high floor into a penthouse with mezzanines.
As for the facades, out of many options, including laconic horizontal and vertical articulations that are quite appropriate in the existing environment, the authors chose the Aalt technique - with strongly protruding balconies that encircle the building with continuous ribbons, and with a clear division into "top" and " bottom". Above the stone plinth there are glass walls hidden in the deep shadow of wooden balconies - Spanish panels with a golden sheen reminiscent of copper. Everything is in accordance with the behests of the great Finn, including the departure of the plane of the wall of the main entrance from the red line of the building and the glass canopy above it.
It is easy to see that the volume of the apart-hotel contrasts with the classics of plastered cottages, but this, as Aleksey Ivanov admits, was the idea of the project - to emphasize the belonging of the new house to a different time.
