Wood and Glass Villa / Karlikova Architects
Wood and Glass Villa / Karlikova Architects
Text description provided by the architects. Here you see a suburban villa, which is situated in the spruce forest by the beach of the Kyiv water reservoir. The house’s purpose is to host events, such as parties for large quantities of people and biker club meet-ups (50+ people).
The Bavarian chalet’s form served as an inspiration for this project, since this silhouette is close to the client in spirit. The terrain difference was strong in this particular area, so a basement floor was built. This created a large garage space, which, on the weekends, could serve as a party zone. The rest of the rooms fell into place on their own—All living spaces and bedroom views open up to the water reservoir, while the kitchen and hallway windows look out onto the forest.
The house’s construction method is the Prefabricated House, realized by the Kager House company. This sped up the building process significantly, most of it takes only a week, with the walls having high quality and perfect geometry. The entire realization of this project took a total of one year, starting with the beginning of the construction and ending with the renting out of the building.
A difficult element of the house were the console stairs—different types of structural solutions had to be developed for its realization—separate from the basement and the wooden panel in the house’s built-in construction. Nevertheless, the carcass had to be remade a few times throughout the process of installing the stairs.
The finishing elements of the house were selected to correspond with the nature around it. The wood used for finishing was the same color as the spruce of the woods in the surroundings, and the floor pattern was made to repeat that of the bark. The color balance of the interior is neutral, which makes its natural elements highlighted. During the interior-designing process, our main concern was to leave the exterior in the spotlight and keep the interior of the house simple.
There are two entrances to the house—one from the basement, and another from the living room. A long sky-light window has been placed atop the dining area, which allows an enormous amount of light to enter. This makes the territory seem vast, even though the distance from the floor to the ceiling is only 270 cm.
The ground floor features a large studio/living room which reveals a view of the water, a spacious kitchen, a double light source in the dining room, a master bedroom with a personal restroom and wardrobe area, and an entrée hall. The 1st floor contains four guest bedrooms, an open study, a hall with a good view of the second light source, as well as two bathrooms and a wardrobe zone. Thus, we were able to create the perfect house to meld into its gorgeous environment year-round.
