In order to build a family home high on an Austrian mountainside, architect Sigurd Larsen turned to prefab construction, creating the building’s walls and roof in a factory before assembling them on-site. The house, built for two teachers in the nearby village and their children, was designed around the site’s extreme landscape, taking in panoramic vistas of the hillside and valley below from the first floor, and framed views of the surrounding mountains from the second.
Instead of bringing in earth-moving equipment to create a flat building site, Larsen designed the house in harmony with the hill’s natural slope. “We built a fairly normal house, like a big black bar that touches the landscape at one point, and then below that there is a new space, which is open to all sides,” says Larsen. This cantilevered structure also provided a unique space for a kitchen on the first floor, which the architect sheathed in glass on three sides, to create what he describes as the “feeling that you could just run out onto the hill.”
The house was designed in harmony with the hill’s natural slope.
Outside the kitchen, which Larsen envisions as the heart of the house where upstairs and downstairs meet, is a square terrace, set just below the house, and articulated at a different angle on the hillside. This terrace, which contains basement storage below, is the foundation of a cabin built by the family’s grandmother that formerly occupied the site.
The house’s exterior is clad in local larch timber that has been stained a dark gray; it’s a metallic shade that stands out among the area’s homes, which are traditionally clad in untreated pine that time and the elements have stained black. “The anthracite gray color has a little shine that makes it change color in the daylight. It can shine from dark green to dark blue according to the weather condition. In the rain it gets a deep black color,” says Larsen.
The ultimate resource for design industry professionals, brought to you by the editors of Architectural Digest
Upstairs, smaller windows in the building’s siding frame particular views. Set low in the wall, these windows highlight views of the valley below when a person is standing in the room. But seated in a chair, the sky and vast mountain ranges that make this place so spectacular make themselves visible.
Larsen designed the house to have a “feeling that you could just run out onto the hill.”
Building in Austria’s Alps presents a myriad of challenges to the would-be architect, from long winters that put the brakes on construction to steep mountain roads that can stymie machinery and material deliveries. Instead of building the house on-site, Larsen and his team had the the facade prefabricated. The architect explained that with prefab the majority of the work could take place over the winter in a heated factory.
A look inside of the home, and the stairs that lead to the second level of the two-story home.
Once the pieces were hauled to the site, the exterior of the building went up in only 12 hours. With the exterior complete, flooring and interior work could take place inside the structure. Larsen explains his rationale behind prefab construction saying, “Prefab is a little bit faster. It’s a way to build that makes better conditions for the people who are working, and it’s not so dependent on the weather, which can be tricky in both Denmark, where we build a lot, and in Austria.”
The home was built into the natural slope of the hill, allowing for spectacular views of the area.
Despite its prefab construction, reverence for woodworking and local craft is present throughout the house, from the local wood cladding to built-in furniture such as the kitchen bench and wooden staircase. “The carpenters in Austria are very skilled,” says Larsen. “They have been building there for the last 1,000 years or so, and they have lots of knowledge and they really have a culture for woodworking. It’s a humongous pleasure for an architect to work with people like that.”