Articles by Sabrina Leiva

The original planning brief foresaw an adaptation of the existing house, which was inhabited by the building owner at the time. The home owner’s driving aspiration for the project was the integration of a swimming pool with a visual relationship to the outside. After many design variations and the exhaustion of all building parameters it became clear this would not be feasible within the constraints of the old house. However the strong desire for a private swimming pool remained, leading the owner to the courageous decision to tear down the original house and build new in order to realize their ideas.  

The project House ML + M + R in Pordenone, in the north east of Italy, involves the expansion and recomposition of all four facades without altering the current outline of the previous building except for the south elevation, where the facade is conceived an extrusion through a bow window façade on three levels.

This project is by a long, open beach, on a desert dune rising in front of a wetland. It is a seasonal house to accommodate up to three couples and can be leased or bartered for the rest of the year. Its intermittent occupation and isolated location led us to think of it as a superposition of two models: the motel and the cabin. The motel suggests self-sufficient rooms served from the outside by second access, while the cabin presumes a centralized space that brings the community together. A set of 4 rooms come together in a shared central kitchen, forming a larger compact structure enclosed by mobile panels, which open different possibilities of use according to their position.

“This house means everything to us because it is the fruit of constant efforts to pursue our dreams,” said the homeowners, a married couple of young age and active lifestyle. Talking about the house they have just bought, they wanted to renovate it into new living spaces and a home office–a fashion factory producing handcrafted leather products.

The plot is characterized by the surrounding residential buildings with sloped roofs, and the available narrow site. This leads to the idea to design a slim building with the gable facing to the street. The building appears in a simple form of an archetypical house.

Terada House is an annex built on a vacant lot next to the existing house. It is a new home for the client and his family (his wife and two children). Due to the limited buildable area, the building was designed within a 7.28m x 7.28m plan based on the standard module of wood structure. 

The entirely new Cistercian Abbey of Saint-Jean-de-Matha was made to express the harmony and simplicity governing the daily lives of the Cistercian monks. The seven daily masses pace their lives. In accordance to their way of life, the abbey’s different spaces seem progressively circling around the cloister and culminate towards the church, the project’s focal point. At the very heart of the building, the cloister preserves a part of the forest and allows the abbey to have a sample of the passing seasons.

The two houses “Im Wygärtli” are located in a villa garden on the southern hillside of Hofstetten. The buildings are situated across the slope and are accessed from the north on the upper floor level, which offers a beautiful view towards the first hills of the Jura Mountains. The curved shape of the roof creates its own topography, which connects the two floors and turns the location on a slope into a part of the design concept. On the inside, a single-flight staircase provides the spatial connection between the entrance hall on the upper living floor and the sleeping floor below. The dynamic and open staircase creates a strong reference between the two floors. It also allows daylight into the translucent bathroom cubes – which are built out of glass blocks and divide and structure the lower floor.