The garage is integrated in the ground floor at the eastern short end of the long house. Behind and above it the family lives and works on a usable floor area of 140 m². The architects’s ground floor studio and the living and cooking space on the first floor form an open spatial continuum connected by a metal spiral staircase. Just a curtain is used to provides a minimal visual and acoustic screen between the work area and the stairs. The more private first floor is divided up into several smaller spaces. It contains the parents’ bedroom, two bedrooms for the children, and a bathroom. As there is no basement the new house does not provide all that much storage space for the family. A large closet in the bathroom, a pantry on the first floor, and shelving in the garage are used to store everything that does not need to be kept in sight and easy reach all the time.
A loggia over the garage forms an important space for family life. Through an open grid of timber beams at second floor level the void to this loggia extends right up to the roof. The parents’ bedroom on the second floor opens onto a second smaller balcony at one side of the loggia void. At the opposite end of the house the sanitary facilities are grouped around a single services riser. Here, at ground floor level, the geo-thermal heat pump that provides warmth for the house is located in a small services room. It is connnected to a ground probe that extends 140 m into the depths of the earth just beyond the back wall of the building.
It is not just the building’s height but also its envelope of larch that distinguishes Haus Rosa – called after Brandner’s older daughter – from the rendered pitched roof houses that surround it. The facades are articulated by open bays that are defined by larch uprights. From floor to floor the axial distance between these posts is reduced by half: on the ground floor the posts are at 2.50 metre centres, on the top floor this disstance is only 62.5 cm. In the interior the structural grid of 1.25 cm is perhaps most evident in the ribbed beam ceilings above the two lower levels of the house. It was only above the garage and in the roof of the house that Sebastian Brandner used flat cross-laminated timber ceilings. On the top floor this gave him the freedom to place some of the non-loadbearing walls on the top floor outside the structural grid.
The facades consist of prefabricated, storey-high timber panels. On site these panels were given an inside facing layer and cellulose insulation was blown into void thus created. Working on site, carpenters made the grids of beams that form the floor slabs. These timber floor/ceiling slabs are only 42 cm thick, to compensate for their lack of mass the heating screed is an unusual 100 cm thick. Whereas on the two lower levels of the house this screed is exposed, on the top floor a carpet made of yak wool creates a cozy domestic atmosphere.
The spiral stairs that connects all the floor levels is a minor masterpiece of metalwork. The newel post consists of two parts onto which the landings and steps were welded on site by the firm that produced the stairs. A delicate mesh of steel wire was stretched across them and is fixed to steel bolts in the steel rings that line the circular openings in the floor slabs. The stairs is one of the few fixed points in this system of spaces, which for the most part is left open to allow change. The structure is almost entirely free of loadbeaing internal walls, which facilitates future alterations to the floor plan.
