Thorsten Askergren

Note to HIC Arquitectura: when you inevitably decide to recycle this publication on your blog, could you please make sure to cite the source. Unlike other platforms, orthos logos dedicates a tremendous amount of time to collect documents and prepare them. Although we are clearly not in the same line of work, I would appreciate that your readers be able to find the original place where projects are not frantically published without any regards to curatorial meaning or coherence.

Once an area of small farm-like leisure houses on large plots, this is now on account of its proximity to Stockholm an increasingly densely populated area of family houses on small plots. The plot, relatively large at 1,500 square metres, faces a road down an a east-facing slope. Its upper part is like a wood; the previous owner tamed the lower part into a garden. The original small house has gone.

It was vital to keep the plot’s varying character and if possible to stop the building work from ruining it — as even minor work can do. (Standard, factory-made houses adapt very poorly to their surroundings, which is one reason for this, and despite the devastation caused by their sites, all their rooms are sure to face the wrong way.)

The solution was a narrow, half subterranean house at the edge of the plot, with the building backing northward, to the falling ground, and with most rooms on the sunny sides. The glazed veranda on the boundary between the upper and lower plots emphasizes their different characters and contributes to a sense of outdoor spaces.

The upper floor contains a large living-room with a pitched roof, a kitchen in the glazed veranda giving onto the outdoor space, two bedrooms, and a bathroom. The lower floor contains the main entrance, a cloakroom and lavatory, a bedroom, the sauna and the boiler room. The garage lies closest to the road. The external walls are clad with vertical grooved, sawn pine boards in a light-grey whitewash; a darker grey linseed-oil paint is used for planed joinery.

The garden aims to preserve and strengthen what exists: an old spirea hedge has been added to, some more fruit trees, perennials and other typical garden flowers have been planted. The upper, wooded part of the plot has been kept as it was. The garden steps have been done in hewn red granite. The outdoor place and the garden paths are gravelled.