Vrieling

This holiday home, which will be turned into a permanent house later on, situated in Cielle, a borough of La Roche-En-Ardennes, lies at the edge of a green valley. This aspect plays a major role in the conceptual development of the home. After all, there is a wonderful view of all surroundings from the property. The strict town and country planning regulations pegged down the design with regard to maximum volume and dimensions. Within these limits we managed to design a spatial house, where attention was paid to integration with the environment and the client’s wishes. The whole consists of two separate parts. On the street side, there are garages in a rectangle, while the actual house is situated more towards the back garden, parallel to the street. With regard to shape, this house refers to the archetypical shape of a ‘house’: a floor, walls and a pitched roof. The living space is stretched out over the entire available building width. The organisation of the various spaces is linear: the living quarters are a continuation of the dining space and the kitchen, and continues into the sleeping quarters. Due to this organisation of successive spaces they almost all have a view of the lovely valley. The sleeping quarters were created through a split level. There is one en suite bedroom under the roof space; two bedrooms with washbasins are partly submerged in the ground. The living quarters have optimum spatiality by reaching from the floor to the ridge of the pitched roof. The archetypical model of a ‘house’ is given full internal lay. The large glass parts reach from floor to cornice and are positioned on either side of the space. This through setup enables the interesting connection from the house to life in the street as well as the view of the valley and corresponding Ardennes landscape. The chosen material is simple, austere, natural and contextual: slate, wood and rubble. The house’s shape is reinforced by finishing the roof surface and the walls uniformly with charcoal grey slate. The wooden exterior joinery gives the house a warm touch and forms a nice contrast with the slate cladding and the rubble masonry.