The romance of airships, which rose to a height of several thousand meters, made round-the-world flights already in the 1920s (it was "Graf Zeppelin" who made it) is felt in this house. Firstly, the arched glass wall of the living room (central atrium), with a reverse slope, directly resembles the lower part of the airship, even the drawing of devitrification - like that of a zeppelin gondola. Secondly, in this house there are so many decks (the language does not dare to call them terraces), springboards, spiral staircases, masts and other captain's bridges that the game in a ship / airship / starship is implied. One can imagine that this complex machine is part of a circular spaceship, because in the general outline of the plan the house is a segment of a circle.
But everything, as usual, is more prosaic. The complex plan and multi-part volume of the house is explained by the task of placing it on a small area of irregular shape. It was necessary to close ourselves off from the neighbors, and the architect and the client made a non-trivial decision: the front parts - a glass two-story atrium with a living room and a glass pool - should be oriented towards the driveway, and more closed living quarters would turn towards the neighbors.
On the ground floor there is a living room (102 m2), dining room (43 m2), swimming pool (172 m2), kitchen (52 m2), forming a spacious and bright ceremonial space for receptions. In the other part of the house there are two guest rooms with a bathroom and an office, which is also very spacious (40 m2). On the second floor there is a master bedroom with access to the terrace and a descent to the pool, and two guest rooms. There is also a large library - a passeistic typology that is preserved only in the homes of the humanities.
For the son of the owners, something like a captain's cabin was made on the second floor - glass apartments "flying" above the ground. There must be a captain at the airship! Aside from romance, this is a transparent techno-style belvedere, and two-story, in the height of the second and third floors. The open glass part serves as a nursery, while the bedroom and bathroom are hidden in the back. There is also an exit to the roof from the third floor.
When the house was planned, the boy was 13 years old. Initially "ZEPPELIN" was intended for two generations of the family, but since it was under construction for about ten years, during this time the third generation has been outlined, and now Roman Leonidov has been ordered to expand the house - the design is about to begin.
The house is so complex and multi-part that each of the facades is in some sense unpredictable, like a sharp plot twist. The image of the house is characterized by super-plastic: many levels, intersecting volumes, consoles, far removed on metal supports, create the impression of various flows of energy, working forces, tension of steel muscles or parts of a mechanism.
A uniform horizontal grid in the processing of light stone brings the complex shapes of the house into a single whole. For the man-made ship-airship image, aluminum cladding "asks", but the customers preferred a more solid option - stone, which created some contradiction between the immanent "eternity" - the retrospectiveness of limestone as a stone, and the dynamics of technogenic-romantic forms. So once the architects of the Russian avant-garde imitated innovative concrete structures using traditional bricks - a more traditional material pretended to be more innovative. Here the stone “pretends”, and I must say, quite successfully, with aluminum, and perhaps this is beneficial for architecture, as it promises noble aging. The house becomes a kind of monument to the zeppelin, more eternal, with a higher status than the technical product itself.
