Beloura House

Klaus-Peter Gast

Description

This house draws attention to itself with the appearance of its material, unusual in a suburban context: aluminium with a matt glow. The surfaces shimmer in red as well as silver as accents on a composition of merging cubic building sections gliding down the slope. Anabela Leitao and Daiji Kondo wanted to respond to the topography directly and define the slope situation clearly inside the building as well. So they designed a building that follows the terracing, set back by half a storey each time, and thus illustrating the various functions within the body of the building. Two sections of the building are visible from the street and access side, but they join in the basement storey and on the building line, combine on the garden side and at the same time become more strongly differentiated. The living room on the entrance level widens out towards the garden and leads to a swimming pool area above, which dissolves almost completely into glass.

The stepped building mass flows down the slope to the garden and terrace area in front of the swimming pool, which is combined with the framing, load-bearing walls and forms the base. The staggered levels from the front to the back of the building offer interesting spatial interpenetration, leading on the access floor from an office area at the front to the living room with adjacent kitchen. The living room and the library above it as a gallery are linked by an air space, with the semi-staggered bedrooms on this upper floor adjacent behind it. The stairs become a joint, an intermediary and a penetration area, interpreting the topography and furthering the particular spatial quality of this design via the subsequent air space, a downward-flowing ‘spatial cascade’.