From certain angles, the house resembles the gable-roofed cottages in the Swiss village of Riedikon, which dates back at least to the early 8th century, on the lake known as Greifensee, near Zurich. Come closer and you realize this house, with its pitched, tentlike roof, its strip window following the angled roofline, and its enclosing screen of 315 vertical spruce slats, rough sawn on the sides and CNC-milled on the front and back, is nothing like its neighbors. The 3,175-square-foot house, designed by Zurich firm Gramazio & Kohler Architecture and Urbanism, is a reinterpretation of the regional typology that, as
Working with a familiar client, the architects were asked to design a 1,228-square-foot suite addition with a basement level of 1,072 square feet to a house they had renovated in the past. This time, the clients wanted a private world to themselves—separate yet connected to the main house. Design concept and solution: Within the simple white brick gable of the three-story addition, a wooden tower contains the bedroom, generous open bath, and dressing area on the main level, with a meditation space upstairs. A basement level has a gym, massage room, and storage. The tower, inside and out, and the
Alex de Rijke, founding director of dRMM Architects in London, and his client for the Sliding House hadn’t seen each other since their days as schoolmates and teenage motorcycle enthusiasts.
A storefront from the early 1900s, which had served as a drugstore and soda fountain, is converted into a live/work space for a couple in the real-estate business.
If you ask Georg Kratzenstein, project architect for Frankfurt, Germany based Meixner Schlueter Wendt Architects, to describe the house his firm designed for a family of five in the town of Kronberg im Taunus, he will tell you it’s a “completely normal, pitched-roof house, built on a slope, where the mass of the garden floor has been subtracted.”
When the owners, a couple with five children between them with one still living at home, purchased the overgrown, approximately 1.5-acre property, located in the tree-lined Seattle neighborhood of Washington Park with views of Mount Rainer, Lake Washington, and the Bellevue skyline, it contained a charming but modest traditional house and guest cottage in need of repair. The architects spent time pursuing the possibility of a remodel and addition, but the state of the house and site made this option unfeasible. The ensuing design stemmed from a combination of reverence for the original house and site and Domestic Architecture’s theoretical