Just outside the village, in the grassy agricultural countryside, a new estate is being developed. Through the placement of new wooded banks and groves, a coulisse landscape has been formed, creating smaller enclosed landscape rooms. Water that bubbles up here on the Peelrand fault is collected in ponds and water courses that meander through the rough herb-rich vegetation.
A new family home has been designed in one of these new landscape rooms. The orientation towards the sun and the location and view in the landscape chamber is leading in the design. By using only natural and dark materials, the house tries to blend into its natural surroundings.
The house is constructed of masonry disks in a dark brick placed at right angles to each other. The crossed stacking creates private spaces all around and continues the coulisse effect. The stacking also creates separation and privacy, giving the house a more closed character towards the public road and the neighbours.
The bedroom floor is half sunk into the ground and oriented from east to west. The long sides of this volume are bordered by closed brick walls and glass heads. The master bedroom is oriented towards the morning sun and has an adjacent patio whose edges undulate upwards. Planted with tropical-looking plants, this has created an enclosed space where you can be somewhere else for a while.
The entrance to the house is in the closed façade of this sunken wing.
A lower brick wall perpendicular to this wing carries the upper floor. This residential wing is oriented from south to north and protrudes at the front, giving security to the entrance and also forming a canopy for the parked cars.
In this lifted living wing lies the large living room. A robust fireplace element divides the space into two atmospheres: an open seating area that looks out over the dining room into the garden, and an enclosed TV room where the evening sun enters through large west-facing windows.
As an intermediary between the bedroom and living wing, the kitchen - and dining area is laid at ground level, so that these spaces have a direct contact with the terraces in the landscape. With the sun at your back, you look at the sunlit wooded banks.
One of the brick walls extends further into the garden and forms the back wall of the pool house. A beautiful swimming pond, fed by water bubbling up from the peel edge break, reinforces this line. Rich planting in the pond surrounding the swimming area, connects the pond to the wildflower garden that flows around the house.
Through the geometry of the house, the fly-out walls, bordered by wild vegetation that overflows into the herb-rich grassland landscape, an environment is created that plays with light, views and sightlines and where inside and outside are in continuous dialogue.
The Peelrand fault is a geological fault line in the De Peel area in the south of the Netherlands
