House "D" Velenje, Slovenia, 2003 - 2006 | Sadar Vuga Arhitekti

Client: private client
Address/Site: large site on a steep slope with panoramic views across the valley,Velenje,Slovenia Building area: 250 m2
Total floor area: 341 m2
Storeys: garage and storage + kids floor + living and pool and terrace + private floor with master bedroom
Structure: concrete plinth, concrete platform, brick + concrete walls, upper steel frame structure Cladding: black coloured bitumen tiles on steel supporting structure, coloured and transparent glazing
Architect: SVA (Jurij Sadar, Boštjan Vuga, Miha Pešec, Adrian Petrucelli)

On the topography of the steep ground, five construction strips with different cladding fillers create four different exterior fronts of the House "D".

An abstract front with strips, which closes the view towards the east, a Californian front, with a bold console of the ground house, a Profanes front, where the house opens towards the pool, terraces and green surroundings. The fourth front of the house is a local one and it creates the relationship between neighbouring houses. All the above-mentioned house fronts pass on from one to another with interlocking, where two fronts merge without loosing their own adjacent character. A cinematic sequential experience is therefore created.

The diversity of four house fronts extends into recognizable micro-ambience's which give the house its identity: the garage, camouflaged into ground, house entrance below the pool console, the reflex of the environment in the large reflecting glazing of the front, fluid living-room space, which is illuminated by notches between strips, kitchen protruding towards the outside, which divides shade and sun terraces, bathroom and bedroom, joined by the terrace…

The House "D" is implemented into a very generic Slovenian semi-rural suburbia. It creates an ambiguous, soft relation to typical double-pitched roof, not-too-big-windows and at-least-one-balcony houses in its direct surroundings.

Steel framed upper part with a plateau of living-swimming-entertaining is suspended on the green painted, green grown concrete plinth. Approaching the site, the house is perceived from underneath. A very cinematic sequence which underlines the house particularity in the surroundings.
You can imagine the client’s family enjoying sunbathing on a pool deck, high above roofs of neighbouring houses, with an Arcadian view to a hilly landscape of Slovenia.

Text and images from:Sadar Vuga Arhitekti