This timelessly beautiful home in the middle of a magnificent tree population is a very good example of when a life situation requires decisions that are not so easy to make. Here, everyone involved has acted with foresight and a view to the future. What to do with the family's overly large home when the children have left home? How do the parents want to live now and under changed circumstances in old age? The owners split the plot with the villa from the 1930s in order to have a new age-appropriate building constructed for themselves on the rear part of the Pfeifenkopf plot. They commissioned Peer Schwenke and Michael Carstens from architecture firm scoopstudio directly.

For the two planners, the focus was on creating a retirement home that had to be barrier-free on the first floor. It should also be possible to divide the new building into two residential units at a later date, for example to accommodate a care worker in a separate apartment. It was also important that the building did not lose its design effect as a single structural unit - despite having two separate apartments. The guiding design idea was a composition of staggered individual volumes, which dissolve into ceiling slabs and wall bulkheads. The ceiling slabs stand out in the façade as metal bands and are supported by simple wall bulkheads: a flat supporting structure that enables flexible floor plans and large, floor-to-ceiling windows. The new building was positioned close to the northern boundary of the 80-metre-deep plot in order to maintain a suitable distance from the front building and create a spacious south-facing garden. A second structure is built on top of the lower building volume, which is oriented at right angles to the plot and elegantly slides over the double garage to the east, creating a sheltered entrance to the house. The staggering of the structures also creates a large roof terrace for the upper floor. Both volumes are accompanied by a "floating" wall slab along the length of the property. This creates the greatest possible privacy in the ground-floor terrace area and separates the access road with the garage from the garden. On the terrace side, the wall has an airy staircase as access to the upper apartment. Inside, the interlocking structures are also connected by a staircase, which can be built over if the units are separated. The kitchen is then created on the upper floor at this point, with pipes and connections pre-installed in the staircase wall. The residential building was designed as a timber frame construction and delivered completely prefabricated with mortise and tenon joints. The horizontal alignment of the volumes is reinforced by the larch wood façade made of rhombus strips. The ends of the ceiling panels were clad with light-colored sheet metal. The house consists largely of renewable raw materials, and a geothermal heat pump makes the highly insulated building with underfloor heating independent of fossil fuels. The future-oriented and flexible usability of the building is also sustainable.

www.scoopstudio.de

Living space: 99 m² (first floor) + 70 m² (upper floor)
Construction time: 14 months
Construction method: Timber frame construction, prefabricated
Energy concept: Geothermal heat pump

Photos:

Dominik Reipka
www.develop.reipka.de

Peer Schwenke

(Published in CUBE Hamburg 03|23)