Interior - Main Area

Inside > Out

Once inside it's immediately apparent that this house was designed primarily from and around the views, emphasising (as all good architecture should) the strengths of the site and location.

Living Architecture director Mark Robinson recalls: ‘When we approached Peter Zumthor to design a house, he said: “If you find me the right site I might be interested.” Six months later we showed him this one and within a few days he’d produced a little sketch from which the design pretty much developed.’¹

FLOOR PLAN - ZUMTHOR DESCRIBES THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE HOUSE AS 'A BLOCK, ANOTHER BLOCK AND A ROOF, SUPPORTED BY FIVE COLUMNS' - THREE ON THE OUTSIDE AND TWO ON THE INSIDE.

Second skinINTERIOR REVEALS ITSELF CAREFULLY, ONLY AFTER A PAUSEThe oblique orientations of the walls and furniture create deliberate surprise. As you enter (on the right in the plan above) the heavy leather curtain marks the entry threshold and creates a pause.

Entrance SequenceMoving inside, you notice your voice echoes, but not as much as you might expect. A soft carpet runner deadens footsteps.

The long tall coat rack to your left and pendant lights used in his project in Therme Vaals define your route to the centre of the space.

While the main room is open plan, it is divided into intimate areas through careful positioning and grouping of functions and furniture.

These zones are either dense or open and look either outwards or inwards - the combinations evenly balanced to cater for most situations, both individual and as a group.

dense

SOLID- The main dense zone here is the kitchen which is a series of defined blocks, the coat rack being the reverse of the kitchen storage. It primarily looks inwards though there are Cascading ViewsFIRST THINGS FIRSTsecondary views out.

Kitchen Front / Coat Rack BehindEVERY SIDE HAS A USE- The library built into a wall by the bedrooms, looks inwards.

open

- The dining area which is focused inwards by table and chairs, but with secondary views out to the valley.

- The main viewing spot by the window in front of the dining table, looks outwards west over the valley.

Writing AreaNOT SURE HOW MUCH WRITING VS STARING OUT OF THE WINDOW I WOULD DO- The writing area which is a quiet corner behind the chimney, looks outwards for inspiration.

- The North Wing, looks outwards.

- The chairs around the fire for when the weather is inclement or at night, looks inwards.

Bubble makersChairs have high backs for intimacyEach area feels distinct and private even though they are arranged with no physical barriers between them. This is achieved by their orientation but also, in the case of the chairs in the house, by height.

Chairs that have high enough backs to partially envelope your head enhance the sense of privacy to the point that you soon forget there is anything behind you. Lower backed chairs around the dining table encourage open discussion.

Concrete

Materiality throughout the house is disciplined - cherry wood, glass, slate floor tiles, stone and rammed earth concrete.

I read that when the rammed concrete walls were being constructed, the first Smooth yet roughMASSIVE YET HUMAN-SCALEDlayer was done too well: it was too smooth...Peter wanted it not to be too perfect, so it was redone.

This then contrasts with the precision of the geometry of the walls and columns as a whole, and the floors which are immaculate.

From the exterior you can see that the roughness of the rammed earth diminishes as you go vertically through the building - the massive horizontal roof is smooth, the base granular, full of detail.

Floor

No repeating floor tilesChaos within orderIt takes a while to get used to the idea that every floor tile is a different shape and size. So while the surface of the tiles are flawless, their asymmetric tessellation constantly draws the eye. This is because each piece of slate was added to the floor in whatever shape it arrived in - it might have broken on its journey in - so the design was constantly remodelled to accommodate. Which equals less waste, though more design time.

Festival of shadow gapsHelping with the zoning are shadow gaps - sharpening edges, defining areas. They create a clean separation between materials and surfaces so that ceilings appear lighter than they really are and junctions remain neat.

According to the Guardian article on the House:

"The stone floor required a long-range discussion about the placing of every piece, between the quarry in Somerset and Zumthor’s office in Switzerland, which also required a two-year search to find a quarry with both the right kind of stone and a willingness to take part in the intricate design process."²

Definition at every turnIt is so smooth it's like the surface of a pond but the more you look at it, the more it reveals its complexity, both in terms of geometry and grain.

The floors in the bedrooms are a different experience, simpler in some ways but still sensorially rich : Warm, not cool. Slightly rough not smooth. Fragrant rather than inert. Regular rather than irregular. Strips not slabs.

Glass

Glass is obviously one of the major features of the house, and is what allows it such a vibrant relationship to light and the surrounding environment.

Glass choice was therefore no less meticulous - triple glazed Thiele Glas panels from Germany. With a panel height of 4.2m floor to ceiling, it keeps the views unbroken and the heat in. No cold bridging means no condensation, which is crucial for a design like this to work in a climate like ours.

Sound

There being a few sound nuts in the group, naturally we were interested in why the sound in the space didn't echo more despite all the giant sheets of glass.

It was likely down to a combination of factors : the roughness of the slightly aerated rammed concrete would absorb and scatter sound waves, the orientation of the walls and columns are oblique which helps eliminate reflections as they bounce in random directions rather than straight back at you, the sheer size of the main room means that most sound has lost its energy by the time any reflection reaches you anyway and the rugs and soft leather and velvet chairs would all have helped absorb and scatter reflections as well.

The opposite happens in the north wing corridor which has no acoustic attenuation other than the rammed earth wall on one side. It is more or less sheer hard surfaces facing each other and it rings with any sound you make as the reflections compound.

Fireplace WindTIMO SÄILÄ

We also made recordings.

Timo borrowed a Schoeps ORTF setup to record the ambience of the space. Given the room's size, you do get a great interplay between sounds that are defined and those that are diffuse.

The building is well insulated from outside sounds other than through the fireplace when the wind blows. Most of the sounds you hear are internal reflections, echoes of inhabitation, but the wind in this recording connects the inhabitants to the landscape outside through a different sense.

Some other examples which may seem small but matter in an open plan configuration with no acoustic separation or attenuation by walls or doors:

Tools- The kitchen drawers were precisely engineered, soft-closing and lined so they were effectively silent.

- The kitchen countertop was timber wrapped in zinc which meant that any sound on it was also dampened.

The principle is simple, and particularly applies to kitchens :

When two objects touch, as long as one of them is a softer surface you will minimise clatter.

Otherwise it can get quite intense - think ceramic, china or metal on glass. Intense interactions tend to modify your behaviour - you're generally more apprehensive as you feel you might smash something accidentally. It's why glass tables or marble/granite countertops can be thought of as 'tyrannical objects', to reference Bernard Chaveau, as they force us to modify behaviour. It's harder to relax and can affect confidence, especially in an unfamiliar environment.

Sounds trivial, but it can affect how you cook or enjoy the space much more than you realise!