A15 Villa
Our commission, located in the Buda hills of Budapest on Svábhegy, was for a
contemporary villa to be designed on a steep plot with rich vegetation. The primary design purpose was to find connection with the historical classicist villas of the area, while adjusting the footprint of the building to the topographic and natural features of the plot.
The tent-roofed building arranged into a square floor plan is gently retracted from the street, thus only the floor mass is visible. The entrance level is located at the canopy of the trees. Its lower level is partially below ground level. An atrium has been designed to assure that the building also receives light from the south-west side. This atrium not only influenced the shaping of the mass, and revealed the classical volume, but also became the main organizing element of the floor plan as all functions are arranged around it. Both the communal spaces upstairs and the private rooms on the lower level open up to the view of János hill with the Erzsébet lookout tower in the distance.
The planned building has a reinforced concrete structure, with an exposed wooden roof structure leaning on the reinforced concrete beams of the interior. The dual use of materials on the outside derives from the duality of the structural concrete elements and the extra-long, rusty burgundy-colored ventilated brick cladding. The material of the retracted surfaces around the green roofs is a black-painted lamella wood paneling. The doors and windows are black aluminum. The roof is a high-roof roof cladded in dark gray sheet metal.
The defining elements of the structure also appear in the interior: concrete beams and the visible wooden roof render other elements of the interior design to only subtly assist the main elements, turning them into internal extensions or pairs of the exterior cladding.
Basically, a restrained interior design concept is dominated by landscape elements, interior gardens and structural elements appearing in the large openings. The interior details were designed to support all the subtle harmony that develops between the outside and the inside.
In its cultivated order, the garden designed around the building is all that connects the structure with the surrounding unspoiled wildlife. With their raw, visible concrete surface, only the retaining walls required by the characteristics of the terrain stand out around the building.
