The villa is located in a district in Černošice near Prague. Its owner decided to build the house on a very steep plot of land. He took advantage of the slope of the land in an unusual way. Instead of levelling the ground, he decided to set the house on concrete pillars, so that the structure appears to be suspended over a precipice.
The modern house was designed by Ján Stempel and Jan Jakub Tesař of the Stempel & Tesar architekti studio. The single-storey building has 294 square metres of floor space. The district in which it stands was built at the beginning of the 20th century. There are many Art Nouveau villas from the time of the First Republic in the neighbourhood. After 1989, Černošice once again became a popular place for the construction of representative residential buildings. The village itself began to be identified not by a particular architectural style, but by the uniqueness of the buildings erected here. Investors, depending on the thickness of their wallets, erected their showpiece houses as an indication of their status.
Villa Sidonius (the name used by the architects to describe the building) was built on a hillside. The plot is one of the steepest and highest in the vicinity. The slope offers many advantages, but also creates numerous constraints and challenges. The plot’s advantage is undoubtedly the view of the Berounka valley, surrounded by the hills of Bohemian Karst and the silhouette of Prague in the background. The architects wanted to take advantage of these opportunities and make the attractive view a daily occurrence for the residents.
The designers decided on an unusual design. They decided to set the house on pillars, making the building resemble a steel footbridge that rests on a steep slope and is slightly rotated to provide the best views. The architects admit that the house is a technological experiment, because on such a steep plot of land, a house built using traditional methods would not have been built.
The entrance to the house is led through a tunnel next to the garage, which ends at the base of one of the pillars. There is a lift that takes the residents to the living level. The heart of the building is the large living room, which has a dining room and kitchen in addition to the living room. From this level, one can access the south-facing terrace and the garden. In front of the house, it was even possible to build a small swimming pool.
design: Stempel & Tesar architekti – Ján Stempel, Jan Jakub Tesař
photos: Filip Šlapal, www.filipslapal.cz
Read also: Single-family house | Modernism | Minimalism | Concrete | whiteMAD on Instagram
