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Unrelenting Use of Wood as Modernist Graphic Interest… Is Interesting

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This vacation home designed by Russian architect Peter Kostelov shows a very unusual use of wood, all wood, and nothing but wood – just as if it were a more modernist design, using more brutal construction material like all-concrete and steel.

We are used to seeing wood look charming and quaint. Not uncompromisingly modernist.

Throughout, graphic interest is created by juxtaposing the wood horizontally as well as vertically.

The unrelenting use of wood extends to each and every single room in the interiors.

The bed even seems to get a wooden cover, can that be? …Oh, no, I am mistaken. It’s just been designed to appear at first glance to be yet more wood.

There is a little joke-y change of pace in the kitchen ceiling, because even here, the quirky alternative chosen is cork, which is made from the bark of the cork tree, so this is actually also a kind of wood – used instead of the tree-based wooden material more traditionally considered to be wood.

What’s that at the bottom, though? Slate tiles. They must be over concrete, softening the effect to something more naturally variable, the way that wood is. It is essential to be rot proof at the earth intersection, so the wood gets a break, for practicality’s sake.

But of the many many ways to build green, this has got to be one of the more interesting examples! I get the sense of some quirky Slavic humor here. Is it an inside joke shared between architect and his clients?

Via Doornob