The wooden "House for Two Artists" is located on the wooded edge of SNT LOMO-1 to the west of the village of Roshchino, to the north of the Gulf of Finland. The forest is uneven-aged, damp, spruce.
The architects managed to place the house so as not to cut down trees, which is why it turned into a narrow and long, albeit rather large, 159 m2 - "pencil case" 30 m long and 5.5 m wide. A through hole-chamber of the porch, with a staircase on one side and a ramp on the other, a kind of gate to the forest with a playful lattice of a static wooden "gersa" above the opening, divides the house into a workshop - an almost square high space on the left, occupying about a quarter of the entire length in the western part - and residential three quarters. Here are the living room, the rooms of the two children, the parents' bedroom, where another small staircase leads, from the end of the house, apparently in order to sneak away from the children from a forest walk.
The block of the house stands on a slope, and the roof is horizontal, so the workshop is the highest room, and further to the east the streams of rooms become lower. However, in the nursery, there is enough space for mezzanines with beds, well lit thanks to the southern slope of the roof. Above the parental bedroom, a mezzanine turret rises, as it were, an observation tower, echoing the “gers” of the gate. That, together with the burnt wood of the facades, endows the house with the imagery of the northern outpost: a tower, a gate, a burnt tree, somewhere near the wall behind the wall, white walkers … All this provokes fantasizing - the forest, the north; Russian outposts, and Finnish ones, were made of wood. Someone here defends itself on occasion, does not let the enemy cross the border, surveys the surroundings in search of danger … If you go further, irony turns on: the well-known banality about the house-fortress, "castles" of new Russians around every big city; here the same theme is treated differently, in a noble "northern" key. However, the associations are not given head-on, they are not read immediately and quickly dissipate: the forest is much higher than the observation tower, and the windows are large, they glow lively and comfortably. It looks more like a romantic memory of a fragment of a fortification that was inhabited as a summer cottage.
The house participates in the ArchiWOOD prize, the winners of which will be announced at Arch Moscow.
