Articles by Valentina Villa

Backwater, a new detached home designed by Platform 5 Architects replaces an outdated bungalow on a promontory in a secluded lagoon in the Norfolk broads, providing practice director, Patrick Michell with a family home. Designing a new building for the plot provided the opportunity to enhance the setting by establishing a stylish counterpoint to more traditionally designed neighbouring houses while respecting the peaceful location. A key objective was to create simple, contemporary living spaces at the centre of the house that is orientated to benefit from the views of the surroundings.

At a lakeside camp, where tented and cabin campsites are proven attractions, the Girl Scouts set out to add a different sort of shelter. They wanted treehouses, something to evoke the sense of adventure, fantasy, delight found in the lofty constructs of backyards and forest getaways. The new 36-person site at Camp Graham consists of a series of pole structures along the wood’s edge, linked by an elevated path that winds among the trunks of the native trees. The challenge in treehouse making is to build without doing harm to the trees, and to extend access to all campers.

This project is an order from a Parisian family living in an apartment, who wants to move in a town house to get more space and live together with the grandmother. Between two common walls, the owners had an infilled plot in Paris suburb.

All rehabilitation services for people with mental illness are grouped in this building. The center is composed by the repetition of a 6m wide space module. A system of economic and energetically sustainable constructions, plus the domestic scale and the warmth of the interior spaces added to the relationship between building and nature, makes this a HEALTHY BUILDING.

This 2,500 square foot residence sits atop a precipice with views to the metropolitan Denver valley to the east and the iconic Flatiron peaks to the west.  The interior spaces are austere, reflecting the disciplined lifestyle of the homeowners.  

The Atlas House is situated on the edge of the city of Eindhoven, opposite a historic rural estate. The compact square building manifests itself as a tower. It is rotated 45 degrees relative to the street and is detached from the boundaries of the plot. All windows are grouped around the corners and at times allow for diagonal views through the volume. Internally, the rotation provides striking vistas along the edges of the forest. The depth of the façade openings reveals that the size and colour of the bricks is the same both inside and outside. These define the character of the raw and restrained interior. The external facades offer no clues about the playful offsets of the internal spaces. The interior reveals a collection of rooms of various heights and floor levels, each giving their respective window openings specific characteristics.

The Linear Cabin is a small, unassuming family retreat, its long, low-slung body sitting on top of a steep bluff overlooking Alma Lake in the sparsely populated Northwoods region of Wisconsin.  A narrow gravel road weaves through the forest and leads to a small clearing, where the simple, 900-square-foot bar building marks the threshold between the densely wooded plateau and the lake bluff beyond.  With its simple plan, restrained use of materials, and precise detailing, the Linear Cabin continues Wisconsin’s rich legacy of cabin architecture – an unapologetically contemporary building that echoes the elegant clarity and rustic warmth of its typological predecessors while carefully avoiding bucolic sentimentality.

Reclined within a well-heeled residential enclave, KAP-House reposes behind wild grassland that grows from the remains of the old Malayan Railway. Placed on a plot that was once the sprawling garden of a classic colonial black and white bungalow, the home was imagined as a paradigm of modern tropical living.