House in Opatova / P-U-R-A

Architects

P-U-R-A
Location

Opatová, Slovakia
Design Team

René Dlesk, Roy Nash
Cooperation

Michael Franke, Branislav Repka
Site Area

960 sqm
Area

152.0 sqm
Project Year

2007

Text description provided by the architects. House stands on the southern edge of previously independent village Opatova, now part of county town Trencin in western Slovakia. Approaching from the south it's clearly visible from far distance. White prismatic volume truncated by two oblique cuts of the roof shines likes a beacon welcoming the visitors of the village or countless passersby. It has become an unintended landmark.

The internal programme of the house is divided to its own public and private. The public, including dining and main living room, is located on the ground floor. More intimate and private spaces house second floor. However, those two realms don’t stand strictly apart. They are interconnected by large void above kitchen that brings them together. Independent on actual position, one can sense the activity elsewhere, without disturbing its privacy.

The roof shape determines the spatial qualities of internal spaces that vary in height from 1.3 to almost 8.5 meters in crest. This gives the possibilities for future extensions of some of them, e.g. one of the kids-room will become a duplex by adding a simple timber platform that will increase usable space of this room by almost 2/3.

Structure of the house is rather traditional. Brickwork of vertical walls, in-situ poured concrete foundation and horizontal floor constructions, carpentry and tinsmith of the roof, compound thermal insulation with white rendering, together all makes good use of the local craftsmanship resources.

House was designed with awareness of sustainable behaviour, part of which is longitudinal west-east plan orientation that, together with facade composition, makes best use of low winter sun that provides sufficiency of winter solar gains. On the contrary, large well insulated northern face of the house is almost blank, securing only minimal natural illumination for internal circulation.

Ongoing dialogue between 3 neighboring new houses stands for a specific social experiment. Considering local habits and tastes, one might find the house behaving bit outlandish, not really well accepted model of behavior here. On the other side other two houses are traditional. Traditional here means that they were shaped by tastes of well marketed catalogue house products that enjoy the favor of the majority of Central-European population already for decades. However, due to the number of common issues that binds dwellers of all houses together, unsurprisingly racial intolerance between different family house-races is not the case here.