This weekend house was built between May and July 2008 on lakefront property at the Arendsee in Saxony-Anhalt. Our goal of designing the house in harmony with its environment and in response to our client’s priorities suggested wood as the key-note material in structure as well as both interior and exterior paneling. Moreover, our choice of wood allowed us to build the house within a short time frame and at an appropriate cost. With its steep saddle-roof, the building echoes a feature of its neighbor, a traditional north-German thatched-roof house. A ground plan measuring 6.30 x 12.40 meters fits snugly among the trees on its rectangular plot. Cloaked in red-cedar shingles all around, the house will form a piece with its surroundings – increasingly from year to year. While on the north-west façade, light penetrates into the bedrooms and bathroom only through deeply inset slit windows, the house opens to the lake on its south-east façade with a wall largely of glass.

The single-unit structure, with a height equal to its width, is supported by seven ribs of structural plywood with three hinges at the ridge and pedestals of reinforced concrete. The pedestals stand on a dynamically embedded foundation which is insulated against frost, as demanded by the peaty sub-soil. The plywood ribbing segments the interior space. Whitewashed plywood decks the floor and wall-space from rib to rib. All wooden building materials exposed to the weather are designed to lie in natural air pockets, so that treating them chemically would be unnecessary. Only the gable binder and the window frames / reveals required lacquering and consequently maintenance at threeyear intervals. The house has no gutters or metal sheeting. The highly insulated, wind-tight walls, together with excellent-quality windows and the building’s relatively low heat-storage mass, make it possible to do without any central heating system. The house is warmed naturally in winter by passive solar energy and a woodburning fireplace. In the summer, the surrounding woods almost symbiotically protect the house from excessive heat. The house was built for use on the weekends and holidays. We therefore left its interior to be filled and shaped over time by its owners, just as the exterior is to be varnished by Mother Nature as the years go by.