Family house in the Kumburka landscape

When I leave the house where I spent my childhood, following the path towards the forest, after a while a familiar landscape opens up before me – a stretch of multicolored horizons, rolling hills with freshly plowed red soil, and the ever-present spirit of Kumburk, the ruins of a castle and the icon of Novopacka, on the horizon.

On one of the horizons, where Kumburk can be seen as if in the palm of my hand, where the western wind blows strongly and where once stood a lonely windmill, there somewhere a house should stand. A Novopack patriot, who evidently finds the same pleasure in this landscape, approached me with a challenge to design it for him. It's not just a challenge, but also a heartfelt matter, where I can utilize all my experiences and knowledge of the local specifics.

The house should most likely reflect the undulating landscape, the earthiness, and the color of the red earth or at least the local stones that hide geodes with agates. It should be part of a picturesque settlement along the dusty road with a fruit orchard, which transforms the local solitude, and harmonize well with the surrounding houses. Toward the road, it should appear somewhat inaccessible like a fortress, while fully opening up to Kumburk and the valley. Like a fortress, it should also be solid, stone-built, rising directly from the ground. In the shape of a village dwelling with a courtyard or perhaps a villa urbana with an atrium, of course transformed into the present for today's users. The shape of the house will protect its inhabitants from the unpleasant wind blowing from the valley of Česká Proseč. It will embrace them from behind while they are sitting in the courtyard, providing a sense of safety, allowing only the garden and landscape inside, capitalizing on the view of Kumburk and the valley, and awakening in them the feeling that the castle is within reach.

The house is a single-story rural dwelling for a family of five. The main wing with a large shared living room – the control room, from which one can see in all directions, is positioned parallel to the road. Two side wings for the parents and the children connect to it in the shape of the letter H, which along with the control room creates semi-enclosed atriums: semi-private access and living spaces opening up to the garden and landscape. The main wing and the children's section have sloped roofs inclined towards the atrium, while the parents' section has a flat roof. Toward the street, the side wings transform into lower annexes with covered spaces for cars and symmetrically placed storage. The arrangement of the house brings the eastern and western sun into the main wing, the southern and western into the children's and parents' wings, and the afternoon and long evening sun enters the atrium, only to set behind Kumburk.

Structurally, the house is designed in a wall system of sandwich masonry, which supports the sloped wooden and flat concrete roofs. The supporting structure of the house consists of walls made of limestone-sand bricks bonded with stone masonry, the roof structure is made of solid wooden beams and monolithic concrete. The skeleton is subsequently insulated – the walls with façade polystyrene, the concrete ceilings with extruded polystyrene, and the roof with mineral wool. The sloped roofs are covered with standing seam metal, the flat roof above the northern wing has a cover of softened PVC, and the annexes facing the street have polished concrete. The visual layer of the sandwich walls is partially load-bearing masonry made of reinforced rubble stone. Large split pieces of earthy phyllite are crushed directly on the construction site into smaller ones, then roughly processed and, due to their irregular shape, laid into the masonry with a relatively high proportion of binder, concrete, which is finally pointed. The phyllite is brought from a quarry located a kilometer away behind Větrák, where it is mined as cheap building stone due to its low strength, unattractive appearance with many efflorescences, and heterogeneous coloration. The reinforced surfaces in the atrium are also made from similarly colored stone but stronger. Flat, unformatted slabs of porphyry are laid randomly into the concrete on the terrace. The split cubes in front of the house will also be made from the same material, once it is time for them.