The context of the house is a village in the mid-2000s in the near Moscow region, with normal infrastructure, but, as usual, there is no integrity in the approach to the environment there: diversified houses, assorted fences. House with an area of 570 m2 built on a relatively small area of 32 acres in the lower part of the village, on a drop in relief. Its author, architect Roman Leonidov, tried to include as much of a garden as possible in the composition. The house works as a screen that covers the plot from the road. The garden descends along the relief with terraces.
Two parallel parallelepipeds, two-storey larger and one-storey smaller, are connected by the crossbeam of an inhabited bridge. The two-storey building houses a public area: a living room, a dining room, a kitchen downstairs and a master bedroom upstairs. In the one-story apartment there is a garage and a utility block. Inside the "bridge" there are guests and an office. The entrance is carried out from the side of the road directly under the "bridge" - a jumper. The main entrance to the high building is also located there.
The orientation of the home gives a sense of protection and spaciousness at the same time. The attitude of the house to the street is unambiguous: the street facade is, relatively speaking, a fortress - with narrow horizontal and vertical windows that let light from the outside, but are located high, through them you can not see anything from the street.
Garden facades, on the other hand, are transparent: solid glass walls in the two-story living room and floor-to-ceiling windows in the nurseries. I must say that they were for children ten years ago, but now the children have grown up, and these are guest rooms.
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zooming 1/3 Plan of the 1st floor. Estate Zavidnoe © Roman Leonidov Architectural Bureau
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zooming 2/3 Plan of the 2nd floor. Estate Zavidnoe © Roman Leonidov Architectural Bureau
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zooming 3/3 Basement floor plan. Estate Zavidnoe © Roman Leonidov Architectural Bureau
Roman Leonidov: “We started designing the house 5 years ago. The customer is a top manager of a construction corporation, then he was about forty-five. Now I would have done another project for the same customer at the same place, perhaps simpler. The client wanted a modern style."
The architect proposed a version of modernism with high-tech features. In general, the decision of a house with a light stone cladding of the upper tier and a colored stone of the lower one is calm and elegant, but Roman Leonidov decided to sharpen the plastic with the help of a roof with a huge visor, which is more attached to some public high-tech building of a sporting function like the ski tube of Krasnogorsk Snezhkom. This active element, a canopy lined with aluminum, covers the main building, forming a huge extension from the garden side, supported by a steel frame. Below it, at the level of the first floor, in the open air, but under a monumental canopy, there was a barbecue area. Its borders are the retaining walls of the garden terraces, protecting from the wind and at the same time deepening the space.
The canopy roof lives separately from the main parallelepiped, it is visually torn off from it by a row of ribbon windows and seems to float in the air. At the other end of the parallelepiped facing the street, there is also a canopy extension, but smaller. The tall canopy space gives the house the scale of an exhibition pavilion.
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zooming 1/3 Estate Zavidnoe. Photo © Sofya Leonidova
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zooming 2/3 Estate Zavidnoe. Photo © Sofya Leonidova
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zooming 3/3 Estate Zavidnoe. Photo © Sofya Leonidova
The second active exhibition motif is a bridge on V-shaped supports. They also raise the high-tech level of architecture. Inside the bridge, guest rooms, former children's rooms, are very correctly and romantically located. Along them you can walk not only along the inner corridor, but also run to visit each other along the gallery under a wooden pergola. It is also convenient to walk down the galleries to the open terrace on the roof of the low-rise garage.
The interior of the main building is built on a combination of white walls and warm wood. Entrance hall, kitchen, dining room and living room with fireplace are combined into one space. Moreover, after a series of one-story zones, a high two-story living room with glass stained-glass windows in two tiers, a glass gallery and a spectacular staircase creates a dramatic effect. A pendulum-like fireplace is the unconditional center of the composition.
The wall bordering the outside space, with the barbecue area, is faced with rough natural stone in the part where the chimneys pass, recalling the cladding of the facade, establishing a connection between the interior and the outside world.
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zooming 1/7 Estate Zavidnoe. Photo © Sofya Leonidova
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zooming 2/7 Estate Zavidnoe. Photo © Sofya Leonidova
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zooming 3/7 Estate Zavidnoe. Photo © Sofya Leonidova
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zooming 4/7 Estate Zavidnoe. Photo © Sofya Leonidova
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zooming 5/7 Estate Zavidnoe. Photo © Sofya Leonidova
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zooming 6/7 Estate Zavidnoe. Photo © Sofya Leonidova
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zooming 7/7 Estate Zavidnoe. Photo © Sofya Leonidova
From the living room through glass doors you can access the barbecue area and the garden, to the additional parking spaces formed under the bridge. In general, the interior of the public area with its spaciousness and architectural busyness, gallery lighting, open staircase, white walls, works of art, glass fences of the upper tier resembles the solemn space of an art gallery.
