The house, in which one can almost immediately guess the authorship of the architectural workshop of Roman Leonidov, was built on an open and well-lit area in one of the cottage villages near Moscow. The impressive area of the site and the chamber environment allowed the architects to create a horizontal composition, placing the volume across the courtyard, opening the windows to the grass of the lawns and the forest located slightly to the side. The clients of the house are a young married couple with children, who value minimalism, cleanliness and free space. These three qualities were embodied in the project almost perfectly both in the exterior of the house and in its interiors.
The architects strictly adhered to the logic of building "from the inside out", so that each protrusion or recess denotes a separate room. Already by the outer shell, you can guess what is hidden inside: in the protruding central block there is a two-story living room, a little to the left is a large dining room, in the right elongated one-story wing there is a pool and spa, on the roof of which there is an open terrace, in the left deaf wing there is a garage and premises for staff. All parts are connected by glass galleries. The form thus grows out of the content and not a single detail is misleading. The authors see in their project the features of constructivism and hi-tech at the same time. The extreme conciseness and functionality inherent in modernists are striking.
The main entrance is not immediately recognized. It is shifted to the left, into a niche between the glass cube of the living room and the deaf wing. Transparent doors merge with the glazed sheet of the wall. The entrance is not marked with a visor; it is protected from rain by a small balcony on the second floor. At the same time, above the street terrace in front of the living room, there are two canopies at once - multidirectional, growing one from under the other. The upper one corresponds to the scale of a flat roof covering the entire building, the lower one is visually lighter, glass, held by wide wooden ribs. Obviously, in this way the authors are trying to transfer all attention to the living room cube, located on the central axis of the site. Thus, they are given to achieve the compositional balance of the asymmetric volume.
Upon entering the house, we understand that its internal space is nevertheless arranged a little more complicated than it might seem from the outside. Behind the spacious, light-filled veranda, a long corridor opens, or rather, a gallery with huge stained-glass windows to the floor. You can walk through the building through it, bypassing the staircase hall, dressing room, dining room, living room, and immediately find yourself in the spa complex. In addition to the pool, it provides a sauna and massage room. On the courtyard side, the spa wing is entirely glass, which creates a visual connection with the living area. Excess light is cut off by blinds.
If the first floor is given over to spaces for communication, meetings and receiving guests, then the second is private. Here are the bedrooms of the owners of the house and their children, a study, a playroom. The mezzanine in the double-height space of the living room is adapted for a library. The basement floor is also actively used. There, in addition to technical rooms, there is a cinema, minigolf, guest bedrooms and a second living room, made in the loft style with an extremely restrained color scheme in general, but bright accents of furniture.
The core of the building, as already mentioned, is the living room with an adjoining dining room. The spaces on the ground floor are delimited rather conditionally, with the help of glass partitions that allow sunlight to penetrate almost unhindered into distant corners. The main dominants of the interior are a sculptural spiral staircase leading from the living room to the mezzanine floor and to the basement, as well as a fireplace with a relaxation zone organized around it. The fireplace of a rich graphite shade does not touch the floor, it literally floats in the air. The staircase looks no less impressive - black, with an elegant metal fence. As interior designer Elena Volgina explains, the main decisions were inspired by the style of the 1950-1970s - "the heyday of furniture design and the active search for new avant-garde forms." Hence - active work with space instead of decorating it and filling it with objects.
Outside, most of the walls of the residential building are occupied by glass and natural stone - slate. Separate fragments of the facades are highlighted with natural wood, larch. The same materials are used in the interior decoration. Because of what it may seem that the building is as if turned inside out. This signature technique is present in many of Roman Leonidov's works. But here, due to the tendency of home owners to minimalism, he works especially actively. Thus, the inner walls are finished with the same slate as the outer ones, while the gray quartzite paving of the outdoor terrace continues in the living room and dining room. Only thin stained glass serves as a barely noticeable border between the outdoor and indoor spaces. The ceiling is covered with larch. The glass partition behind the dining table, separating it from the flight staircase, is framed with horizontal wooden slats, echoing the front plank. The same trim pieces are used in bedrooms and bathrooms.
The overall color scheme of the house is deliberately repeated in the interior: cold gray, graphite, beige and white tones are diluted with warm woody and honey shades of wall and floor fragments from solid Burmese teak. Coincidentally, both the designer Elena Volgina and the owners of the house have this favorite color palette. Otherwise, only children's and playrooms have been resolved. In them, the author moved away from the basic shades and splashed all the colors of the rainbow on the walls and furniture.
Lighting played a significant role in shaping the interior. Modern spot and overhead spots, along with tiny wall lights, set the rhythm for walkways and staircases, linear and recessed lighting accentuated the strict structure of the tiered ceilings, and recognizable designer lights accentuated the central rooms. Light became the final chord that managed to fill the restrained modernist spaces with life and warmth, make them, despite their impressive size - and the total area of the house is 1500 m² - cozy and habitable.
