Juniper House
We have spent vacations for many years in this place with relatives of all ages. Most of the time in some sort of collective.
We wanted to design a modern, small, vacation house for our family with two boys aged 4 and 7. We also have bedstead recess with one extra bed for shorter stays.When we started sketching on our own house, on an own site, 50-100 m from the other houses, the close contact with the other members of the big family was crucial. But we were also in need of a private zone. The starting point was sketching a private atrium to the east facing the morning sun for breakfast so we could have a more social terrace facing the evening sun, towards the other family members.
In the sketching process the atrium became a small yard that is prolonged into the house itself, painted white like the rest of the interior.The plot was flat with meagre grassing and the only vegetation of substance was 3 meter high junipers, but there was a glade. That is where we wanted our house to stand. We started by measuring all the junipers in the plot.
The terrace is situated to get the evening sun is like a bridge towards the rest of the family as a half private zone. A centrally placed kitchen works as a living room with a lot of glass and wide sliding doors towards the terrace and the yard that makes it possible to have good contact with the nature and also works as temperature regulator and minimise draught problems.
In Gotland there is a long tradition in preserving the local building tradition. That has led to that many new houses look as the traditional white stone houses with steep-pitched roofs, but we wanted to build a timber house.
We wanted to make a playful comment to the Gotland authority’s ambition to not let modern architecture be visual in the landscape. We also wanted to experiment and explore what you see and do not see of a house and how this affects you and how you experience colour, surface, material, and transparency, inside contra outside light on and through the façades.
We like the slow growing junipers that are green the whole year. Therefore we took a photo of the junipers and made a ¨cloth¨ that is of 35 metres width and of 3 meters height and wrapped it on tree sides of the house the vinyl cloth is put 40 centimetres from the façade, on a galvanized steel construction. The wooden facade is treated with a combination of tar/linseed oil and turpentine.
And as we live there on our vacations we are very pleased to see how the experience of the façade changes all the time and give us a nice feeling of living in harmony with the surrounding nature. Some times you see the wooden façade lit by the sun through the net and in dawn you see the light from the inside.
The sliding glass parts are clad with aluminium from Velfac and full aluminium from Scücho. The large glass partitions are insulated in same plane as the façade elements fixed to the angled profiles made of aluminium.
The floor is ash, oiled with white pigment. The walls and the ceiling are painted white and for the kitchen we have used a concrete board from a factory located in Boge, Gotland. The other parts of the kitchen are from IKEA. The sofa is of our own design and the central table is made of massive ash assembled on a drawing board from the office. The chairs we use are the Y-chair designed by Hans Wegner 1950. The shower is situated outside behind the net.
The wood burning stove, which is a model from the beginning of the 20th century, has a width of 30 centimetres and is the only thing that will warm the central room. The walls are isolated with 120 mm mineral wool. The ground is a concrete plate. The roof is flat clad with tar paper.
Ulla Alberts och Hans Murman, Architects SAR/MSA