Fuhrimann Hächler

Description

The artist couple Barbara Müller and Stefan Gritsch lived in a former carpenter’s workshop. The sale of the building offered the couple the possibility to construct a new house in the yard of the building complex, on condition that the building costs did not exceed the funds raised from the sale. The only feasible way to realise the substantial spatial program involved at the set price of CHF 580,000 was to design the house in prefabricated wooden elements. In terms of urban planning, the polygonal volume and the neighboring carpenter’s workshop form a courtyard around which the studios and the kitchen are orientated. The 1 1/2-storey living room constitutes the spatial focus of the house out of which all of the rooms are elaborated around the central nucleus, containing the chimney and the staircase. The house is conceived as a spatial continuum, enabling a wide variety of spatial relations. Both of the two studios can be partitioned from each other, but simultaneously can be read as an extended living room. The choice of the materials resulted out of the economical constraints. While on the inside chipboards employed for the wall coverings, on the outside we used fir wood for the façades.