It’s just like old times. The year-round holiday home was designed by Jan Strumiłło and Jan Dybowski in collaboration with Anna Libera and Jan Libera. The investors wanted to feel an idyllic atmosphere, so they built a house whose decoration is reminiscent of old Polish buildings. The construction itself was guided by the idea of avoiding the use of plastics.
The house is 220 square metres in size and was built in the village of Buda Ruska in the Suwałki region on the Czarna Hańcza River. The building was designed as a year-round holiday residence, enabling three families to spend time together. The large number of users necessitated the creation of a sizable common area. Examples include the kitchen, dining room and living room with fireplace. Interestingly, three bathrooms were built into the house, each for one of the families.
Right from the start, the investors knew what kind of architecture they wanted. The house had to fit in with the local landscape, so its design draws on the local tradition of wooden houses. The body of the house has a traditional gabled roof with visible purlin heads, glazed porches, a tripartite façade covered with multi-partite boarding, a stone foundation and, last but not least, wooden details are the main solutions that made the house fit in with other buildings in the village.
The exterior walls were made using contemporary log technology with solid spruce logs. They were joined using classic methods and supplemented with modern improvements (self-drilling carpentry screws). The façade was insulated with a layer of 16 cm of wool. The timber structure surrounds a central reinforced concrete shaft housing a spiral staircase and two chimneys.
The truss resting partly on the reinforced concrete shaft was supported on threaded bearings that could be lowered compensatively as the slowly drying house shrank under its own weight. Since the roof truss was topped off, the ridge had settled by about 12 cm over a year and the house had remained dimensionally stable since then. Itwas only after this year that the façade could be finished, the project authors explain.
The designer’s ambition was to eliminate plastic from the building as far as possible. This intention was largely successful, although in many places it proved to be difficult or too expensive to implement. Examples of non-standard solutions are the insulation materials used: below ground foam glass, above ground cellulose wool. Polyurethane foam was almost completely avoided – the windows were fixed with steel wedges and grommets and the gaps were filled with wool – this solution helps to compensate for the settling of the wood. The water supply system is made of pressed copper pipes and the role of the wind barrier is played by wood-based panels – by avoiding a plastic membrane, the house remains diffusion-open.
In preparation for the design of the building and its finishing, I studied and admired the achievements of my older colleagues. Visits to the houses created by Filip Miller in Jaczno enthralled me and set a benchmark for this project. I was also inspired by the house in Pasieki, perfectly integrated into the Podlasie countryside by Mikołaj Nowotniak. Invaluable technical expertise was provided by local carpenters led by Tomasz Czyżyński and the foreman of the shell, stonework and earthworks, Ryszard Bondzio. Construction was carried out predominantly by local craftsmen and using materials produced in nearby factories. Windows and doors were manufactured by companies from Szypliszki and Olecko, beds and furniture fittings were made by carpenters from Suwałki. The tiles for the fireplace and cooker were fired in a Bialystok workshop and successfully joined together by a cooker maker from neighbouring Pogorzelec. The sheet metal for the roof came from Germany, but the roofing company laid it indigenously. The door handles were cast in Łomianki on the model of a product from the pre-war Lubert Brothers company in Warka – model no. 128,” concludes Jan Strumiłło.
design team: Jan Strumiłło, Jan Dybowski, assistance at the concept stage Julia Jankowska, cooperation at the execution stage Anna Libera, Jan Libera
photography: Jędrzej Sokołowski
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