SHSH

The client required the house to be adapted to give sufficient space to frequently accommodate her large family. The project centred around three main aims:

- Put in place new and adequate spaces.
- Connect the house to its landscape and surroundings .
- Re-establish a coherence between the house and its gardens.
With these aims in mind we looked at four changes to the exterior of the building:

- On the west side we added a kitchen and dining room. The extension took the form of a simple low, horizontal cover. This roof covered a space on the same level as the terrace.

- On the east side we added a music room in the shape of a reduced size, opaque volume. Two limited openings give views of the gardens.

- The balcony and the loggia, drastically altered on previous occasions, were removed and replaced by a terrace which is an extension of the main room.

- The base of the terrace was dug out to create three large rooms accessible from the house which now benefit from a direct view onto the lake thanks to the removal of the retaining wall.

For these four interventions we adopted a vocabulary that would ensure a common, homogenous understanding of the house and it's additions. These extensions can be seen purely as a distortion of the existing volume. They have the same pale colouring that dominates the rest of the building - the walls as well as the roofs. In this way the house and its extensions form a sculptural whole.

Client : Private

Place : Chatillon, Fr

Architecture : Shin Bogdan Hagiwara, Thierry Decuypere, Jorn Aram Bihain (V+)