The house is planned in a unique location, in the so-called London's Green Belt ("green belt"). The customers wanted a house for a large family with servants, garages and technical rooms. On the one hand, it must meet the standards of life in the 21st century, and on the other, it must not violate the traditions of the place. London's Green Belt is ring-shaped, ranging from 8 to 32 km wide, and is more than three times the size of the city itself. After World War II, the British government began to think about the problem of urban sprawl, including London. So, as a result of the redevelopment of the British capital, undertaken in 1944 by the architect and urban planner Sir Lesie Patrick Abercrombie, the Green Belt of London was born. Housing and industrial construction within it is significantly limited and subject to very strict regulations.
It was this circumstance that determined the nature and configuration of the building. It is located on a picturesque plot with a total area of 4100 m2planted with oaks, willows and shrubs. Each of the trees has its own conservation status. The house is limited in height by two floors, the area of the ground part of the building does not exceed 830 m2… It consists of three wing buildings: a spa with a swimming pool, a master's and a children's section, combined with a block of rooms with a servant. In the plan, all three wings are united in the center by a hall and a double-height staircase. Like the roots of a century-old oak, different in length and thickness, the wings of the hulls stretch across the site. The arches of the three facades, curved in plan, embrace separate sections, which are organized in three different gardens: the front one, which opens a view from the gate of the section; private spa park hidden under the treetops; the rear overlooks a descending landscape overlooking the golf courses.
The house, with all its plasticity, is made in a single material. Brick of the same type was chosen for decoration - English, dark, but different in texture: somewhere smooth, somewhere rough … “We wanted to stay in the context of local tradition,” says the author of the project, Arseny Leonovich, “where for buildings in the Victorian spirit they use traditional material: brick or limestone."
The facades seem to dissolve in a riot of greenery. And the house itself organically grows in the surrounding landscape. There is nothing superfluous here, but only a modernist play of planes: glazed, brick, lined up in two rows with a shifted rhythm. “The windy climate set us a limitation on glass, so there is not much of it,” says Arseniy. - there is more of it in the pool, enough in the bedroom and living room. But where there should be walls - there they are."
The house turned out to be very functional with well-defined layouts. Three prismatic buildings merge with smooth lines in the center, forming the space of the hall, hallway and kitchen-living-dining room. “In contrast to the geometric cuts of rooms and premises, the amorphous space in the middle of this hall presupposes a very free geometry of the staircase,” the architect Arseniy Leonovich comments on the project. “Here she is alone, front door, coiled up as a snail.” In addition, the building has two elevators, a passenger and a technological one. The house can be walked through and through. From the second floor of the house there is an exit to the terrace of the building with a swimming pool.
The architecture of the house in Green Belt listens attentively to all the promises and limitations of this place, is not imposed on it, but organically develops its landscape.
