Patrick Reuter Architecture

At the edge of a steep hillside overlooking the city and the surrounding landscape, a residential house and a guesthouse are placed as two independent volumes. Towards the city, they appear as two-storey buildings, while on the garden side they read as single-storey linear structures. The garden, with swimming pool, pergola and dense vegetation, forms the spatial counterpart to the architecture. Both houses are accessed from the garden. A space in between separates the residential house and the guesthouse, while simultaneously connecting the upper garden with the lower slope and ensuring the desired level of privacy. The living spaces are located on the upper floor, with the private bedrooms on the level below, embedded into the terrain. A roof light in the guesthouse and a sunken courtyard at the main house bring daylight deep into the hillside-oriented rooms; here, a bridge directly connects the dining area to the garden. The floor plan follows a sequential order of primary and secondary spaces. The main living rooms are framed by exposed concrete walls and fully glazed towards both the city and the garden, while service spaces are positioned in between and articulated with lower ceiling heights. The structural system follows this sequence of concrete wall panels and floor slabs, allowing the omission of transverse load-bearing walls. As a result, open interiors with fluid transitions to the exterior are created, while the lateral enclosures remain robust and precise. This ambiguity between solidity and indeterminacy defines the architecture. It emerges from the layering of exposed concrete walls anchored deep into the terrain and the self-supporting timber beams placed above. Internally, the concrete surfaces remain raw, while externally the buildings are clad with ventilated vertical charred timber slats.