Practice archive · N° 011
House for a Stone Orchard
A walled fruit terrace on a limestone bench, one river north of the city.
- Archive no.
- 011
- Program
- Residence for two growers, with a cold store and a long covered table
- Area
- 214 m²
- Status
- Complete, 2024
- Drawing set
- 2 plates at 1:100
Site north
24° off sheet
The clients grow quince and keep bees, and they asked for a house that would not argue with the terrace wall. We put the house against the north wall and gave the orchard the sun. The plan is one room deep everywhere, so every room holds a tree in its window and a draught in summer.
The section does the real work. The limestone bench was cut once, a century ago, by whoever built the wall. We cut it a second time, gently, to seat the cold store where the ground stays at cellar temperature all year. Where our knife passes through the bench, the drawing turns red. Everything above that line is timber, lime plaster, and clay tile, drawn in ink. Everything below it belongs to the stone and is drawn the way stone behaves: in strata, fraying at the edges, older than the pencil.
Construction took fourteen months with a crew of five. The growers moved in before the paint, which we take as approval.