When does a house become a work of art?
Villa in the Dunes
The Villa in de Duinen (‘villa in the dunes’) in the Hook of Holland, is designed for a couple. Their wish: a house in a dune landscape. A redesigned, sloping dune landscape is draped around the house. This creates accesses to the landscape at different levels.
The main floor is on a concrete plinth containing the entrance. The concrete bunker, half buried in a dune, houses a guest house with its own front door and facilities. On the top floor, the couple sleep in a modest bedroom with access to a terrace. A roof staircase offers views of the sea. Two stairwells and several access points to the outside make endless routes possible.
Simplicity is not a feature of this house. The pleasure lies in all the interwoven layers. The house offers a bunker, a patio house, a bungalow and a canal house, a ‘Mies’, a ‘Loos’, a House X and a Maison à Bordeaux. Not as a postmodern act, but in the form of archetypal transformations. This sounds pompous, yet it isn’t. It’s just the way this house came to be.
data
- Location
- Hoek van Holland, NL
- Size
- 500 m²
- Client
- Anonym
- Discipline
- Architecture
- Program
- Housing
- Period
- 2005-2008
- Status
- Completed
- Photography
- Christian Richters
- themes
Hoek van Holland
Villa in the dunes
An art-loving couple bought a beautiful plot in the dunes of the Hook of Holland. The existing bungalow had to be replaced by a new villa, which also had to provide space for their art collection.
After a joint visit with the client to Alvar Aalto’s Villa Mairea in Noormarkku, Finland, the assignment was increasingly to design a real Gesamtkunstwerk in which life, art and architecture merge.
A stone’s throw from the villa are remnants of the Atlantic Wall – an inevitable source of inspiration for the design.
Life, art and architecture merge in the villa
The design is a stack of three worlds: a ‘bunker’, half buried in the dune, with guest accommodation; a patio bungalow with the living quarters on top of that; and, as a crowning achievement, a closed private domain.
Typology, routing and the use of materials contain plenty of references to examples from architectural history, especially the interwar period – the period that is also central to the art collection of the client.
Ground floor
First floor
Second floor
