Living in the middle of your own private forest is something many people dream of. For a German family, this became reality. They now live in their own low-maintenance, barrier-free forest house that is in perfect harmony with the surrounding nature. For the design of this ecological family home, the team from Cousin Architekt once again opted for a Rockpanel facade.
The owners of this property in Hamburg (Germany) have enjoyed the vibrancy and microclimate of a naturally overgrown 2,000 square metres piece of land since moving there in 2021. Their house was placed into a forest in such a way that only one tree had to be cut down. The minimal strip foundations, a wide cantilevered ground floor slab and floating terrace deck created a lot of living space with minimal soil sealing.
Used products:
Rockpanel Colours Anthracite (RAL 7016)
As little concrete as possible
The topography of the site was also cleverly used in the construction of the house. The entrance road ends at the highest point of the property, in a garage without foundations, which is hardly recognisable as such because the cladding of the door and facade merge. For the building itself, is a fully demountable and recyclable timber frame construction was used, clad with a combination of large glass panes and Rockpanel facade cladding. The window frames and cladding panels blend together thanks to the uniform colouring in RAL 7016. The exterior walls and flat roof were insulated with soft wood fibre boards.
Tailor-made design with Rockpanel
Tim Meinhof, the responsible project manager at Cousin Architekt, appreciates the options of a ventilated facade construction with Rockpanel cladding: "In this project, we used panels halved to a width of 60 cm, which were vertically framed with an angle profile made of aluminium." As a result, narrow silver-coloured lines now run around the building at 60 cm intervals, breaking up the slightly monolithic effect of the cladding mounted in a joint cut. "The whole building floats above the site with a large part of its 190 m2 of living and usable space, and we were keen to reinforce the lightness created by this also through the articulation and cladding of the facade," explains architect Meinhof.
Smart to maintain
One of the benefits of a ventilated facade construction is that everything that’s behind the facade can easily be accessed at any time if necessary. "No homeowner wants to be burdened by costly repair work in the event of damage," Meinhof emphasises, "and no one knows how nature reacts in extreme weather, for example, and what that means for a house in the forest." Rockpanel facade panels are robust against blunt impacts, so they can withstand higher stresses in everyday life without visible damage. A transparent ProtectPlus layer was applied for extra protection. It increases the self-cleaning power of the panels and even enables the removal of graffiti.
