Not far from Novorizhskoe highway in the Moscow region, a house is being built according to the project of the architect Andrey Kaplin. Its compact volume is built of HAGEMEISTER bricks of Holsten GT sorting in Mod F. format (290x90x52).
The project of a country house appeared quickly, was invented "in one breath", - says architect Andrey Kaplin … The author was based on the key principle of modern architecture - from the inside out - from the layout to the facades, which, according to the architect, are "not so important" and are derived from the "content of the project." The main thing is that inside the house is filled with natural light, and the main rooms are spacious, airy and, where privacy is not required, flow into each other vertically and horizontally.
However, the priority of internal spaces did not prevent the volume from becoming compact and growing up rather than to the sides. House area - 390 m2, its plan is strictly rectangular, the house stretches from north to south and is brought under a gable roof with a longitudinal ridge, which significantly decreases, dropping to the south from 14.4 to 11.4. The drop is three meters, and the northern facade is three-storey, and the southern one is two-storey. The unexpected tilt of the ridge and eaves to the south reinforces the perspective contraction, offering the viewer approaching from the north a baroque spatial play. From this side, the house faces the neighboring site and the deaf, windowless wall of the northern end is “fenced off” from prying eyes, leaving only one opening - the bell of the entrance niche at the level of the first floor. The slopes of the portal are included in the perspective game set by the roof, and the entire northern facade acquires almost a temple monumentality, turning into a massive, laconic design of the entrance. The three remaining walls of the house: the side and the southern ones are facing the forest and, in contrast to the northern facade, are dotted with slender rows of vertical windows that cut through the surface almost everywhere, only occasionally - in particular, in the southwestern corner - giving way to a small fragment of matter responsible for peace and twilight in one of the bedrooms on the second floor and in the office on the first. The second entrance to the house, on the eastern façade, is larger, more spacious and marked with a continuous stained-glass window to the height of all the twelve meters available here. This is the lightest wall, it faces the flooring of the wooden terrace, which becomes more spacious due to the fact that the stained-glass window is beveled inward and serves, in addition to the light spot, as a large niche. On the opposite side, in front of the western façade, another smaller terrace is planned.
The described variety of facades, as already mentioned, echoes the structure of internal spaces, partly two-, partly three-high. Three lights - in the living room, it is concentrated in the southeastern part of the house; here the interior is visible to its full height. The living room is permeable to the view from the terrace from the stained glass entrance to the frequent row of windows on the south wall. But - it is closed from the view of neighbors from the north, which is facilitated by the bevel-deepening of the glass wall. A narrow, gently sloping staircase leads from the living room to the second floor, where the bedrooms and the nursery are located. Above - the rise to the third floor, where in the center of the elevated northern part there is a billiard room, whose room is centered and fenced off on the sides; from the outer walls, the billiard room adjoins only the deaf northern one, and to the right and left of it spatial pockets are formed, giving a second light to the bedrooms and playrooms of the second floor, catching the rays of the rising or setting sun, which will probably be quite beautiful. The billiard room turns out to be a nucleus, "suspended", as in a nesting doll, between two light layers of the house, but illuminated only from the south, from the side of the stairs. All this should create interesting lighting effects and large-scale transitions inside the house - from spacious and tall in public areas to compact and intimate in private rooms.
Outwardly, the house, as we remember, is compact, assembled and appeals to the modern reading of the historical building tradition, which has been very relevant in the last ten to fifteen years. The pitched roof is planned to be made of LVL timber rafters, supported on the walls and reinforced concrete frame of the building, and covered with a material imitating shingles - wooden tiles. The removal of the cornice is minimal - 5 cm. The reinforced concrete frame of the walls will be filled with bricks, and the base and insulation is the inner masonry made of hollow "stone" bricks, separated by an air gap from the outer surface of the ventilated facade made of facing clinker bricks. In order for the walls to "breathe" freely, ventilation ducts are provided in the empty seams of the lower row of brickwork - air will flow through them, rise along the wall, and exit through the holes in the ridge of the roof. The wall ventilation system is designed to help avoid the "greenhouse effect", in other words, it will not allow the walls to damp, but fully uses all the environmentally sustainable properties of brickwork, which keep it cool in summer and warm in winter.
The appearance of the house, laconic to the point of monumentality, is set by the properties of facing clinker, a dark terracotta shade. The thickness of the walls is clearly visible, the walls are material and tangible, each corner is carefully "wrapped" with bricks. For several lower rows of the basement, window slopes, edge-sandrids and window sills-ebb, where neat ribbons of brick pokes will come out onto the facade, solid brick is allocated. The main surfaces are planned to be laid out of facing clinker using a technique similar to a hybrid of a modern spoon and traditional, "old Russian" mile: four rows of spoons alternate instead of a row of pokes with a mixed row, where a poke and half a poke of a brick cut specially for this are placed between the spoons. The technique will add a slight ornamental effect to the masonry. The seams are ordinary, noticeable - 10 mm. For construction and cladding, Holsten GT bricks are used, produced at the factories of the Hagemeister company in Germany. The supplier is the Kirill company.
