Architecture Wednesday: House Within A House

It looks rundown; it looks threatening. But, I guess you shouldn’t judge a book—or a house in the woods—by its cover, or in this case, its exterior.

This 200-year-old stone house in Linescio, Switzerland certainly proves that case because, from the outside, the walls seem to be crumbling constantly and you’d never believe it was habitable. But that’s it was only renovated on the inside.

Buchner Bründler Architekten completed this unique restoration that basically involved building a house inside the crumbling other house. They left the exterior more or less untouched, and built a fresh interior shell using a minimalist design approach, so, while the outside retains the rugged stones that made up the original walls, the inside now has fresh concrete surfaces—each slab carefully brought inside and assembled on-site—and modern finishes like tall wooden shutters that fold open to reveal the original window frames, a new bathtub sunk into a concrete floor, and a single slab as a kitchen counter.

The outside is rustic and old, and still seems to be crumbling, while the inside, while kind of bunker-like, is new and fresh and ready to use for another 200 years.

Archfly