Mountain House

01 Idea

A weekend house in a Bolu pine forest: the client wanted a place where nothing would distract when escaping the city, lived with snow in winter and coolness in summer. With its steep gabled roof, the house recalls the region’s traditional upland houses without imitating them. A plain volume gathered under a single roof; the pitch is set to carry the snow load and let it slide off. We want it to stand in the forest as upright and lean as the tree trunks.

02 Space

The ground floor is a single large room: kitchen, dining and sitting around a central stone fireplace mass. The fireplace is also the building’s spine, carrying the stair and the flue. Upstairs, two bedrooms and a study corner sit beneath the roof, and the pitch is felt inside the rooms. On the entrance side there is a buffer hall for snow boots, skis and firewood. A deep west-facing veranda reaches out to the edge of the forest.

03 Material and construction

The house is a timber frame of local pine; the frame and roof rafters are now complete, and roof cladding is beginning. The timber structure sits on a stone basement wall, with a ventilated gap between ground moisture and timber. External cladding is charred timber boarding; the roof is dark anthracite zinc. In the wall build-up we use wood-fibre insulation; for winter comfort the U-value approaches passive-house level. Interior surfaces are pale spruce and lime plaster.

04 Light

In the forest, light filters between the trees and shifts throughout the day. We positioned the windows according to the gaps between trunks; each frames not a panorama but a particular group of trees. A single roof window brings skylight into the stair void upstairs. On winter evenings the fireplace will be the house’s main source of light; we kept artificial light warm and low. From outside, the house will appear as a few warm windows in the dark forest.