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Architects: Saunders Architecture
- Area: 384 m²
- Year: 2018
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Photographs:Bent René Synnevåg
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Manufacturers: Dinesen
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Lead Architects: Todd Saunders
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Interior Architect: SCH Design, Stine Homstvedt
Text description provided by the architects. One of the great pleasures of living in the picturesque port city of Bergen is the way that many of its urban neighborhoods also offer easy connections with the mountains and forests. This is especially true of desirable enclaves such as Starefossen, which sits upon one of the hillsides that overlook the center of the city, the university district, and the winding waterways that lead, eventually, out to the open sea.
Houses here, such as Villa Refsnes, are blessed with some of the best views of ‘the city between the seven mountains’ yet are just a few minutes away from the walking and hiking trails that take you around the lake at Svartediket, or into the woodlands of Bergen’s natural preserves or towards the famous peak of Ulriken. The clients inherited a Forties house that had once belonged to their ancestors. The house sat within a well-sized garden, with a lower level built in stone and the upper stories in timber. But, unfortunately, there was a limited sense of connection with the cityscape and very few windows facing the open view.
Initially, the couple began looking into remodeling the existing house but realized that it would be a long, complicated, and expensive process. Eventually, they realized that it might be simpler and more rewarding to replace the existing house with a building that was not only tailored to the views and the setting, but also to the needs of a family with two children and the desire for more generously scaled living spaces. Saunders and his clients decided to keep the stone plinth of the house, which now holds a separate and self-contained apartment at the basement level while sweeping away the upper two stories of the original structure.
The plinth helps to anchor the house to the site, creating a neat base station for the new building that Saunders placed above it, using a steel framework and a coat of crisply detailed white spruce. The ground floor is devoted to the main entrance, accessed from the uppermost portion of the site, and a central media and family room. Yet it’s the upper story that is purposefully dominant. Here, the southeast-facing part of the house slides gently outwards over the sleeping zone below. This relatively simple but dynamic step not only energizes the outward form and appearance of the building but unlocks the potential for balconies facing the city.
Inside, this part of the house is arranged as a ‘great room’: an open plan living space oriented towards the bank of sliding glass that feeds out to the semi-protected balcony and frames the panorama of Bergen below. Douglas fir floors help to unify this generously scaled space, with a custom kitchen and island at one end, a dining zone towards the middle, and a seating area at the other. The detailing is crisply done and finely executed both within and without. It is a thoughtful process of reduction, or architectural editing, that amplifies the form and outline of the building externally while providing a calm and ordered living spaces internally.
