A country house is a special architectural genre, which, as life shows, is not owned by all of its creators. Many homes require remodeling, treatment, often surgery. Oleg Karlson came up with the Internet project # DoctorHouse: he posts the materials of the projects of houses corrected by him in the “was-now” format on Facebook on the pages of the bureau “ASB Carlson and K” and on his own.
How did the story of your House Doctor begin?
On long winter evenings, walking on the Internet, you can find a lot of different things, including about designing houses. Colleagues lay out plans, developers, advertising suburban settlements, show house designs. And sometimes designers come with a project, they do not understand how to make interiors in the layout they have inherited.
Unfortunately, most of the houses built according to similar projects are subject to reconstruction or demolition. Until the house is built, you can still fix it. And now you are examining such a project, grabbing a pencil, correcting the obvious flaws in the layouts. Or you take a geo-base, plans and redo the project - you plant a house on an axis, apply a modular design principle.
This is how the Facebook page “It was - it became” appeared, where we posted the materials of the original project and the revised one, and correspondence began with the authors to share their experience, show how to do it right, teach the principles of design.
And when I watched the series with Hugh Laurie, I realized that I also fly, not people, but at home. "Doctor House" has been "coming out" for thirty (a question to Oleg, what is considered a season ??) seasons. Every year we “treat” 20-30 projects. We have a goal to correct the flaws of the project before the start of construction, thus saving the customer's money, time and nerves.
What are the disadvantages of the projects that you undertake to remodel?
The most common mistake is when, with a large total area in the house, there are many useless areas: corridors, transit zones that are not included in the scenario of the life of the house, huge furnaces. Added to this are uncomfortable and unsafe stairs - steep or narrow, dark, windowless, bathrooms. A separate topic is the second light. There can be no second light in houses up to 300 meters, it "steals" the area from the bedrooms. Tell me, why move from a cramped city apartment to your own house with bedrooms 10-12 square meters?
It's inside. Outside, there are open balconies and entrances covered with snow, flat roofs that begin to leak every spring, requiring annual repairs.
There are many mistakes in planting houses on plots: the windows of the living rooms overlook the fences, and the auxiliary rooms overlook the gardens. Living rooms face south and bedrooms face north, and this is in our climate, where sometimes the sun does not appear for weeks.
Once I was invited by the program of Channel 1 "Ideal Repair" to the house of Sergei Yursky and his wife Natalya Tenyakova. This is where almost the whole set of design errors was! Starting with the improper planting of the house on the site, as a result of which the house is turned onto the site with its rear facade, and the windows of the bedrooms overlook the fences. The television format left behind the scenes also another thing: as in the bedroom on the second floor, a bathroom that was not provided for by the initial project appeared, as the stairs were redone, which now you can go down hand in hand and without the risk of sliding down.
What, in your opinion, are the reasons for unsuccessful projects?
Our clients are not ready to pay an architect. Often even very rich people are looking for how to pay as little as possible for a project, they invite "architects" who undertake to design a house at 800 rubles per square meter. Well, they get what they then come to us with.
It does not always guarantee the quality of the project and the willingness of the customer to pay. We had to redo, for example, after the Americans, who built a house in the Wright style. Wright's houses are iron logic based on a modular design principle. But this logic still needs to be adapted to our climatic conditions, starting with the organization of a vestibule, which is not in Wright's projects.
Another reason, and this is what I strongly disagree with, is the conviction of some colleagues that the customer's desire is the law. The customer comes to the architect as a professional. The task of the architect is to ask how he sees his house, what kind of family he has, what kind of life he leads, listen, suggest his own version and convince of its advantages. The desire of the customer cannot justify a bad project.
What can you say about your customers? Due to their wealth and high position, these are obviously authoritarian people who cannot be opposed
Over time, you earn your own credibility, and when very wealthy customers come to you, they understand that they are coming to a reputable professional. These customers know how to listen to professionals and listen to our opinions.
Can we say that Russian customers prefer one style?
Houses in the classics are more popular, it is more understandable for our customers. The only problem here is that the customer often wants to make a palace or a manor on 30-40 acres, not realizing that a palace and a manor presupposes space around it.
Customers rarely ask to design houses in a modern style. To want to build a modern house, you need to go through, live the classics. The customer must grow up to modern architecture, understand the thrill of its forms, technologies and materials. So more often we play classics.
Take our village Sokol - houses that were built here at the very beginning. Someone says that this is boring and uninteresting architecture. But in fact it was done beautifully, competently and on a large scale.
What to do for those who are just starting to design on their own, how to learn how to make good projects?
It used to be only magazines, and there are very few of them. At the institute they gave us them against signature. And today there is the Internet, which opens up the entire world experience. Seek, see, take, use, but use thoughtfully. Through the same Internet, wrong layouts wander from project to project. But there are many good projects, and there is no need to invent anything, everything has already been invented.
And you also need to learn to explain to the customer the advantages of competent architectural solutions, and then there will be more good projects, and architects have more reasons to be proud of the results of their work.
The Internet is increasingly becoming a leading educational resource. Do you plan to develop the Doctor House project?
Now the knowledge gained in the design and construction of individual houses, an understanding of the architecture of an ideal house - this is only our experience and our knowledge, about which we talk a little on the page "Doctor House".
In the near future - to launch your own channel on youtube. We are already posting videos on the network where I tell you how to do the layout of a house. New videos will appear on the channel every two weeks: with stories about new projects on paper and during visits to customers. So we will continue to share our experience and we dream that Doctor House will be engaged not in treatment, but in training.
