Less than an hour's drive from Hamburg lies a unique natural paradise: Lake Schaalsee. It was formed by the glaciers of the last ice age and is one of the deepest lakes in Germany. Beech and swamp forests, moors and wet meadows, commercial forests, pastures and fields characterize this landscape. The great diversity of flora and fauna is due to historical reasons, as the inner-German border ran through the lake during the division of Germany, allowing nature to develop largely undisturbed. The area around the Schaalsee was recognized as a UNESCO biosphere reserve in 2000 and covers a total of 310 square kilometers. In some unused core areas, wilderness has been allowed to develop again.

After many weekend visits, the couple searched for and found a place for their desired permanent home. On a spacious, idyllic plot on the edge of the village, they asked Bub Architekten to design a house as a refuge in the biosphere reserve. Alexandra Bub and her team brilliantly implemented their idea of a classic single-storey bungalow that appears spacious and open on a small footprint. The result is a building that is simple in the best sense of the word, with a distinctive, solid materiality that stands confidently in the landscape, but always gives priority to nature. The carefully placed, vividly colored facing brick in a transom format divides and structures the façade of the house through projections and recesses. The rectangular building structure is compact and clearly contoured. While it is largely closed to the north, it expands to the south with four large, rhythmically arranged, loft-like openings to the landscape.

The reduced one-room concept is based on a precisely planned floor plan. A compact core accommodates functional rooms and the fireplace block. It zones the flowing sequence of rooms from the entrance, kitchen, dining area and living room, thus giving the living area a sense of stability and center. Floor-to-ceiling glass and steel dividing elements define usage zones, but their transparency gives them the character of an open floor plan. The motif of loft-like openings on the south façade is also continued in the interior and creates attractive graphic accents.

A cream-colored exposed screed runs through the entire house and reflects the daylight warmly into the room. Together with the discreetly colored furnishings, which are limited to a few pieces, it forms a calm frame for the essentials, namely the magnificent view of the great outdoors. Alexandra Bub describes it like this: "But the main protagonist is still nature, the old apple trees on the dewy meadow, the flocks of birds against the evening sky, the grazing cows on the horizon."

www.bub-architekten.de

(Published in CUBE Hamburg 03|20)