Mountain farmhouse in Šumava

Assignment
The builder's intention was to construct a family house – a mountain estate allowing for permanent habitation in two self-sufficient units. The house should respect the local building tradition while meeting the criteria for family life in the 21st century. It should provide its inhabitants with adequate living comfort while seamlessly blending into the landscape, contributing to the atmosphere of a mountain settlement.

Wider Context
The site is located in the Šumava National Park at an altitude of over 1000 m above sea level. This area is characterized by a dense central settlement pattern along the main north-south communication axis of about 0.5 km in length. Approximately in its middle, it dips over a horizon where the main intersection with a turnoff to Modrava is located, which also serves as the traditional center of the village with a church, municipal office, information center, and other amenities. The development becomes sparser away from the center, with larger plot sizes, houses set back from the street line, and in the peripheral areas, the character of the buildings is completely scattered. The majority of the buildings serve residential purposes – family and apartment houses, guesthouses. The building heights range from 1-2+attic, with gable roofs sometimes featuring a half-hip, oriented parallel to the contour lines.

House in the Landscape
The house is meant to be convincingly traditional in its basic exterior expression, while also contemporary in the construction technology and detail execution, both aiming to meet the demands of 21st-century living. The simple mass is dominated by the roof plane covered with natural slate, featuring dormer windows on both sides. The pronounced roof overhang compresses the mass of the ground floor, the slightly stretched cross section of the gable, partial embedding of the house into a gentle slope, and stone retaining walls – all of this supports the horizontal aspect of the basic mass. The house is embedded, anchored into the ground.

Interior Layout
The layout is fundamentally based on the traditional principle of a transverse three-part division into an entrance part, a living part, and a utility part, here applied to a type with two equal and independently usable residential units without a utility part in the traditional sense. Each of them has its own separate front (clean, representative) and back (unclean, utility) entrance, each with its social area on the ground floor and bedroom area on the upper floor (attic), while sharing a basement with technical facilities, as well as a sauna with facilities on the ground floor and a more spacious multifunctional back porch – a ski storage room. Similarly, the shared porch along the entire eastern side of the house, covered by a prominent roof overhang, can be used as a communal living terrace with views of the Vltava valley.

Construction
The primary construction material is solid wood. The hard lower structure (concrete, stone) along with a monolithic foundation slab in the unbasemented part creates a solid base for the soft upper structure. The timber structure consists of a system of large-format components made from cross-laminated solid wood. The advantages of the structural properties of the main load-bearing structure, stability, environmental friendliness, fast assembly, and flexibility favored this technology over other options (log construction, two by four, etc.). The external surfaces of the building envelope are made of traditional cladding with vertical boards and face strips, and the base of the house is protected against the weather in exposed areas by a layered stone plinth. The internal surfaces are predominantly formed by visually finished wooden load-bearing structures. Inside the living part, solid concrete cores are created – bunkers, which, in addition to functional purposes, also serve structural and microclimatic functions. The stair core is similarly designed.