Country life - design of summer house in Risor, Norway

Architectural Review, The, July, 1998 by Henry Miles

A holiday house built with traditional materials on a magnificent untouched site generates creative interplay between living and nature.

Carl-Viggo Holmebakk built a garden shed which echoed round the world (see for instance AR October 1997). It was admired because it showed a profound understanding of materials and inventive ways of using them. Now, he has completed a rather larger building, a holiday cottage near Riser on the southern coast of Norway, which demonstrates the same intensity of imagination on a rather bigger scale.

The site is typical of the area. Huge glacier-smoothed bones of the earth are exposed as gently rounded rock platforms over and between which pines emerge from a scrub of bilberry, bracken and birch. A place of which every urban Norwegian dreams, it smells of resin and the sea, which is only 70 metres away. The owners have long known the area because they have a cottage nearby. This is now used by children and grandchildren, and a new building was needed for the extended family. But the site was very precious, and the couple were determined that the new building should make as little impact on nature as possible certainly no trees were to be destroyed.

Holmebakk organized a meticulous survey, using the latest computerized gadgets, and generated a very detailed plan of trees and topography. Even so, he had to evolve an adjustable structural grid which can allow concrete stub columns to be cast in situ on to the rock in places which do not interfere with tree roots. Laminated timber beams which bear onto the stubs had of course to be to some extent structurally redundant to allow their supports to be located in unpredicted places on the grid. All seven tough old sea-wind seasoned pines have been preserved and are thriving, though some have had to be pruned a bit to allow them to grow near the building, as close as a couple of feet away.

All the primary structure is laminated, pre-cut and profiled, and connected with steel fixings. So a big box-frame sits on the stubs, wedged up to become horizontal with flat pieces of wood: an almost archetypal detail that recalls precedents in Norwegian farm buildings, as well as Japan and the Classical world. Panels of horizontal timber boards and glass fill the frame, which is expressed. Exact adjustments of solid and void were decided on site once the structure had been erected to ensure best relationships of house, trees and views. But for all the ad-hoc decisions on site, detailing is very precise, and the oiled woods (Norwegian larch, pine and spruce, Siberian latch and particularly precious Norwegian oak) are chosen with great care for their purposes. The simple five degree pitched roof clad in zinc is another gentle reminder of the Classical world without being at all PoMo.

Planning is intimately related to topography, with living area and kitchen opening on to a terrace to the south-west, and the bedroom attached by a library corridor that delineates a little court containing two of the precious trees. The result is a house which has an almost Antipodean or Californian air, woven into nature, with trees growing through it, and decks extending out so that the bald rock domes become part of the living place. And in its intimacy with the bones of Norway, the house also relates to the organic branch of modern Norwegian architecture so beautifully exemplified in Knut Knutsen's own cottage (AR August 1996).

As Holmebakk says, 'The Norwegian summer is short and beautiful, and always longed for ... a summer house could be regarded as an architectural short story - a building task demanding the highest intensity and precision, even if it is all about pleasure and relaxation'.