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Architects: Marazzi Reinhardt
- Area: 400 m²
- Year: 2013
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Photographs:Ramon Spaeti
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Manufacturers: KWC, Naturofloor
Text description provided by the architects. Zur Blume is a baroque farmhouse in the center of the municipality of Löhningen, a small village in the north of Switzerland. The building is part of the historical row development along the main street. The space where the barn once stood was left as a void for years. The new building, which extends the main house, fills this empty space. In this way, two generous flats, flexible in their use and with different spacial qualities, are created as a new ensemble.
The aim of the extension is to provide spacial varieties to both apartments: a ground level access, two floors, cellars, a filtered and private exterior space. It is was a design objective that both units should be able to profit from the specific qualities of the old and the new building. Therefore the two apartments share the old and the new construction overlapping each other through a vertical organization. The atmospheric and structural qualities developed become tangible: the arched cellar, the baroque living rooms, the generous, the neutral space of the extension and the mazed gardens. A shell, made out of lamellas, surrounds the new building completing the facade on the street. The facade is permeable, the wall as well as the roof, obtaining copious light. In spite of the porosity of the new building, from the street the new intervention is clearly readable and refers to the original barn in its volumetry and materiality. The substance of the existing house, where possible, was restored and transformed.
The extension distinguishes itself from the existing building through its prosaic and economic use of materials. It finds its richness in the geometry of the spaces and in the lighting qualities.
