Villa Wood stands out in the suburbs of Copenhagen as an example on how to live and build in a climate-friendly way. Built with mass-timber elements (CLT) and designed through digital programming, this modern archetypic house, makes design possible for a wide variety of families with different living patterns - and preferences.
Villa Wood is developed as a ‘living laboratory’ of modern and sustainable building types that aim for a low climate footprint, but maximum impact on life quality as well as a healthy indoor climate. Housing makes up a large part of the building stock in Denmark, and we spend more than half of our days inside, so the influence of the home environments on people’s well-being, is obvious.
’With CLT elements in mass-timber, we can create and customize houses in countless variations and thus meet a lot of different ways of living, with a healthy indoor environment as a common denominator for all. We experience that living in this environment has a valuable effect on our everyday lives. Besides the nice atmosphere that surrounds us, we also experience fewer allergies’ says Morten Rask Gregersen, partner and architect at NORD Architects and living in Villa Wood.
Variations and customization to match a diverse range of life patterns. The wood elements can be cut and configured in many constellations with numerous variations of size, space, function, and connections between rooms. The house is based on 3D detailing and digital production methods that make way for several types of detached single-family dwellings and can also be scaled for larger housing. The method provides efficient design management, which is beneficial in larger developments. For smaller housing, it invites individual co-creation and cooperation, where the architect and client can develop and customize typologies in a close dialogue that is focused on the needs and dreams of the individual client.
The diversity of people, life patterns, places, and sites call for experiments and customization to meet modern and sustainable ways of living and to create healthy built environments where people thrive and appreciate living for a long period of time. Villa Wood is designed for disassembly, so all parts are potentially destined for reuse. Flexibility, variations on principles, co-creation, and optimization are all elements of this living and creative laboratory we aimed for.
‘It’s interesting how you can incorporate and transfer the recognizable and unique in a building with archetypical characteristics through digital design and production methods. It seems like there is no loss in quality from sketch to production or from origin to the outcome. The basic idea is very visible. The elements in the wood make this characteristic silhouette so precise and distinct, Morten Rask Gregersen continues.
Advantages in construction and scalable design. In this house, the elements are treated with lye on the inside to create bright and natural interiors, in contrast to the charred pine that the house is clad with on the exterior. The charring method is a traditional Japanese form of protection that replaces toxic impregnation – shou sugi ban. The same was used by the Vikings to protect their wood constructions. The exterior cladding sharpens the profile and geometry of the volume as a detached house.
The solid wood elements can be assembled in a few days, which means lower construction costs on site and reduces the weather impact compared to an exposed and open construction.
The compact nature of the solid and stable wood element, the easy assembly, the low material waste, and the lightweight, make the advantages of sustainable living evident. This family house in a suburban area shows how the vision of sustainable and archetypical design, can easily develop from a sketch to the realization of a customized house with generous amounts of life quality and a responsible impact on climate
