The southwestern shores of Lake Vänern, the most important frame of water in Sweden and one of the vital common tenting locations in Scandinavia, are shrouded in a thick woodland of conifer bushes with nary a financial institution or grocery retailer inside miles. On this panorama of summer season getaway, an A-frame house of extraordinary scale and subject material composition has not too long ago touched down throughout just about a part acre this is wholly in contrast to the string of campgrounds and cottages lining the lakeshores simply out of view.
The primary house finished via Naturvillan, a Sweden-based structure company not too long ago based via Anders Solvarm and Niklas Dahlström, Atri combines a crystal transparent subject material and structural expression with a minimum environmental affect. The pointed geometry and pine tones of the encircling bushes are integrated in the house’s putting outward presence, the place two hovering partitions of glass lean towards one any other to expose an internal virtually completely composed of bushes. At night time, the glow of solar-powered lighting fixtures radiates from the house outward to light up the shrubs simply past its perimeter.
Regardless that an all-glass, essentially open-plan house would possibly seem inefficient to warmth and funky year-round (particularly inside a Scandinavian local weather), the expansive quantity is supplied with sufficient strategies of passive cooling (together with operable home windows and vents for move air flow) and off-grid energy-efficient units to have greater than sufficient calories to spare. All over the summer season, the photo voltaic cells at the lengthy partitions of the A-frame energy the interior battery that runs all the house’s electric and water heating programs, whilst a fairly out of date wood-fired kitchen oven supplies warmth and scorching water all through the grayer months.
The huge three-story atrium (from which the identify of the house derives) used to be conceived as each an enclosed wrap-around porch—whole with a eating desk and living room areas sheltered from the lakefront winds—in addition to a greenhouse that blurs the respect between the inner and the nice outside. An extended row of plant beds runs alongside all of the south-facing wall and purifies the air and grows culmination, greens, herbs and spices with little upkeep, due to a base irrigation device with water equipped via a drilled neatly at the belongings.
The central internal of the bottom ground is designed as a succession of not unusual areas to offer constant perspectives of the outside (save for a small skylit bed room simply off to the facet of the hallway). An extended galley kitchen with ash counter tops runs parallel to the plant beds for simple get right of entry to when the produce is able for harvest and results in the principle not unusual house, which itself is separated from the “porch” via a sliding glass door that additional blurs the indoor/outside difference.
The primary flight of stairs results in a fairly smaller ground plan with an open workplace and the master bedroom, either one of that have direct get right of entry to to an internal balcony overlooking the greenhouse, whilst a 2nd, treehouse-like flight results in a slender rooftop deck that gracefully extends throughout all of the atrium. Slightly under the apex of the construction, the deck maintains miles-long perspectives of Lake Vänern obscured best via conifers.
