Caramel Architects designed this house for a family in a suburb of Vienna, Austria. Description from the designers: a family with one child and maybe more to come dreams of moving from their apartment in the middle of the city to a house at the periphery with plenty of green.
they envision children playing in the grass, the parents and their friends sitting amongst them, and all around nothing but green, trees, pure nature. the purchased property is a 500-square-meter plot, a grassy meadow with trees. four levels, three above ground and one below, are to yield a total of 300 m² of living space.
in order to retain the character of the original meadow, the ground-floor living and dining area are tied to the garden in a generous sweeping gesture. This gives the feeling of a 500-square-meter living room composed of outdoor and indoor spaces. The tail end of the swoosh tapers to human scale forming smooth shallow depressions for sitting, curvilinear furniture, a pool and terrace with rounded corners.
the sweeping gesture on the ground floor is made of semitransparent polycarbonate elements. The ephemeral character of the material is also employed in the façade of the top floor, giving it the appearance of an airy, hovering swoosh.
on the rooftop, the patch of meadow removed from below is woven into the undulating green office landscape. grassy green fields on several levels interspersed with ephemeral swooshes of space.