Swiss architect Peter Zumthor built the Secular Retreat project in the spirit of the best villas of Andrea Palladio.
The house, which took ten years (!) to build, was Peter Zumthor's first building in the UK. It sits on a hilltop in South Devon, with impressive views of the surrounding countryside.
Secular Retreat — is the seventh villa built by Living Architecture, the rental company founded by writer Alain de Botton. The idea behind the project is to offer rent a house designed by a famous architect. In the asset Living Architecture already has homes from MVRDV, John Pawson, and Grayson Perry.
The building is located on the site of a destroyed house from the 1940s.
A few details from the past remain - a hexagonal courtyard and many 20-meter-tall pine trees.
Zumthor designed the house out of concrete, laying the material using a special technique that creates distinctive stripes on the walls both inside and out. The "crushed" concrete walls were built up layer by layer, each line representing a day of work. The limestone floors were also time-consuming, with each slab being specially selected to fit. Every broken slab brought in from the quarry meant a rebuild.
The plan of the one-story house is very simple - there are two wings. One of them consists of two bedrooms, the other - of three. Each bedroom has its own bathroom. The two wings meet in a space where there is a living room with a fireplace, a spacious dining room-kitchen. There are also several secluded places where residents can enjoy personal activities, such as reading or listening to music.
"I only produce originals," emphasizes Peter Zumthor. Almost all the furniture was designed by the architect himself, including the wooden dining table, the seats upholstered in purple fabric and camel skin, and the small pink chairs in the bedrooms. Zumthor very rarely builds single-story houses; most of his previous projects were public buildings.
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