A Surfer's Villa

The Client is a middle-aged surfer who spent most of his younger years in Austria. During our initial deliberation of preliminary alternatives we discerned he desires something beyond the ordinary white cubic villas found in central Europe: < dynamic and potent like waves >.

The challenge which lay ahead was to assoil the Client’s considered agog architecture into a flat and level surface while abiding extremely regulative planning framework and town criteria in the project’s establishment:the limits of construction, maximum allowable height, no direct exposure/view to the east and west etc.

The project’s land is located in the southern east end of a square at the end of an alley, between the middle of two western and eastern alleys; 100 meters to the coast. So for the first step, we rotated the building form its center to the west, to both frame the sea’s dazzling sunset and also highlight the project’s entry.

For anClient with such spirits, the room is only a place to sleep in, so we idealized to not restrict semi-public and multi-functional space to the ground level and deploy it as a fluid form in the project. With this strategy, we started development by placing spaces in the southern third of the building and in form of a box using identical materials. A box which at the top, accounts for bedrooms and bathrooms and on the bottom includes the kitchen and dining room. 

The void is placed on the northern edge of the structure, to both provide a visual connection between the living rooms but also so the floor’s thickness does not interrupt the tall northern window. This solution miniaturized the top living room into a ship’s deck that from the top houses a view to the terrace, north courtyard and fireplace.

According to regulationsthe main entrance to the building must have been placed on the western section of our structure. So we folded part of the shell in such a way so that both the entrance is behind it and is therefore protected from relentless rainfall, and also, in interaction with the skylight which we placed over it, it would shape a unique and somewhat mysterious corridor for the entrance.

Roofed terraces were alsopart of the Client’s demands which we, by combining them with external and internal space, managed to convert into one of our main ideas for this project. We stretched the stone shellover the structure through multi-stage folding, which created the intended terraces and also met the required slope roof. The said shell is in such a way as if it has risen from the surface of the earth where the front pathway is placed, has covered the northern terrace, and has rotated on the surface of the structure like waves and ended on the south terrace; a process that has clearly intensified the building’s dynamics. (Diagram 2-5)

To emphasize the lack of boundary between outside and inside, tall windows in both the north and south are only separators, especially in the north of the building the windows has been placed in such way as if at a fluid point it has ended the building’s shell and fireplace; a point that can be placed slightly ahead of or behind.

Opposite this window, over the north terrace, we placed a narrow gap so that during rainfall a small waterfall of raindrops, in combination with a view framed in the window, marks a very distinct experience.

In the home of a surfer, oldsurfboards should have a special place; so the eastern edge has widened the stair void and we set up a skylight on top of that so a special status is created for the boards and everyone, with each pass of the stairs, experience their presence more.

For the outer cover materials of the building shell, several options were evaluated and perhaps stone were the last of them, but there was a fundamental issue that ultimately led to it becoming our first option:

<The fact that the sheathing covering the roof and walls must be made of the same material so the rotation of the shell is more dominantly visible.>

This, in addition to financial constraints and the implementation of exposed concrete and cement beveled body ultimately resulted in the building wearing a wavy, white stone shell.