In a Swiss village just beyond the picturesque city of St. Gallen, Kit Architects has reinterpreted local vernacular with Tower House: a family home for four built from prefabricated timber and assembled onsite in just three days. The architects explain that the three-storey home demonstrates "how industrialised construction can enable resource-conscious and high-performance residential architecture." The result, contemporary in form and environmentally conscious in construction, sits in perfect harmony with the surrounding built landscape.
Location
The building is located on a triangular site at the edge of a village in the St. Gallen's Rhine Valley. Its unique position and shape challenged the architects to design a home that made the most of the surrounding views while maintaining privacy for the family. They achieved this by stacking functions vertically, ensuring a compact footprint while preserving surrounding land for potential expansion in future. Large windows are concentrated to one side, with smaller openings facing those areas more frequented.
Regional typology
The design reinterprets local vernacular, stretching the gable typology common to the region to new heights. The tall, narrow facades give the building a tower-like presence, while its materiality contributes to a sense of local and domestic scale. The roof features large overhangs which protect the timber envelope while extending the weather protection outward.
Material form
Spruce trees, abundant across the Alps, has long been one of Switzerland’s principal construction materials: seen in log huts and gabled farmhouses throughout the mountainous region. Today, it underpins much of the country’s contemporary timber architecture—albeit in slightly different form. The Tower House is built from prefabricated spruce timber panels that were manufactured off-site. This allowed the home to be assembled in just three days, drastically reducing construction time, site disturbance and material waste.
Floorplan
Inside, the timber remains exposed, its natural form contrasted against metal finishes and a central concrete stairwell that creates structural stiffness for the building. The home is divided across three levels housing a range of private and shared living spaces. The ground floor opens onto the garden through large sliding doors, and the bedrooms on the upper floors feature sweeping viewsacross the landscape.
Sustainability
The design utilises passive strategies alongside renewable energy systems to minimise energy demand and maximise thermal. A ground-source heat pump provides low-carbon heating and cooling, while a rooftop PV system designed specifically for Switzerland's gabled rooftops generates renewable electricity. The system is paired with battery storage, which stores excess energy for later use thus reducing the family's reliance on the main electric grid. Together, these systems enable the building to produce more energy annually than it consumes in operation, achieving a plus-energy standard.
