MODERN HOUSE GARDEN OPTION
The iconic building architecture and the indoor rooms destinations were carefully studied in order to be linked, both on functional and visual levels, to the created outdoor spaces.
The kitchen – living – dining space structure is a glass cube, so the impact of the outdoors is obviously of the outmost importance.
The guests’ rooms are semi basement, when looking out from inside the room the view is on the front garden ground, a special characteristic which needed to be addressed with a lot of attention.
The signature feature of the project is the rectangle shape trimmed trees. This strong visual effect is traditionally used and expected in city parks or in large avenues. The fact that we used these in a 1000 m2 space enhances the trees convincing visual presence and provide balance by scaling the different living spaces of the project.
The rigorously shaped foliage was used to link the garden and the wild forest that can be seen at the back of the property.
This project had major technical aspects to be dealt with and all the digging, excavating, draining, leveling, terracing, ground preparing proved to be costly and very time consuming specially during the winter in Europe. In some parts of the property, we elevated the ground by up to 4 meters which means that a lot of logistic was involved.
The house was already built, and we had to bring and re-plant 5 meters high trees in the property, that was a challenge too.
The location being in North Europe, there’s a lot of rain and lawn maintenance is a something that needs the sort of true dedication that not everyone possesses. It was decided to use moss instead of grass, so we planted some 60 000 small pots of moss, with hidden underground irrigation, which was somewhat of a first in the area, in order to keep the functional and visual aspect without the maintenance effort usually associated with large lawns.
For some floor surfaces we used custom made colored concrete slabs. In order to obtain a natural and visually pleasing effect we made casting of the water patterns left by the tide in the sand on the North Sea shore and reproduced these unique organic patterns for our concrete slabs.
All the structure is made of weathering steel so we worked closely with an ironmonger for that part before we could work on soil.
We collaborated closely with several nurseries. Our regular partner nursery to select, prepare and manage the trees and several others for the moss and potted plants. We had clay pots specially made in Italy as the texture and tones had to be perfectly right and coherent with all the other elements.
Finally, we commissioned metal artworks with remarkable shapes to provide a sense of coherence and a theme throughout the whole project. The art is skillfully dispersed on strategic locations of the property.
