TERROIR

Externally this house is a blunt cube in the landscape, an uncanny one that contains a contrastingly intimate interior. This play is repeated in the spatial concept. What appear at first to be interiors are continually externalised, through for example, the use of materials and floor to ceiling glazing that at its openings creates a vertiginous relation to the exterior.

These public spaces of the house were conceived as plateaus. They are compressed around the more private functions - toilet, bathroom, bedroom etc - that occupy the solid centre of the house and that push up from the base. This core is understood conceptually as having been carved from the massy substance of the site, an idea that is reinforced in the colour scheme, and provides a counterpoint to the public plateaus of the interior and their colours. The core folds out into the landscape in a suntrap courtyard connecting the spatial sequence of the house with the slope of the site.

The courtyard and vertiginous windows suggest, conceptually, another level of folding outwards and interconnection with the greater landscape. In this sense the play of interior/exterior is extended to take in the valley and the hill.

This is a new architectural direction for Terroir, a new way of engaging with site and landscape through the compression of cubic spaces which distinguishes this project from other Terroir projects in which the line plays a dominant role in spatial distributions.

This house can be understood then as a play of doubles - blunt/intimate, interior/exterior, carved space/plateau - in which the experiential qualities of house, of home, of inside and landscape are folded together in a powerful expression of place.