Wood&stone

On the layout, this house looks a lot like a twin-hull boat:the two “boats of privacy” are connected with a “deck” of the double-height drawing-room.The two “boats” are turned “bottom up”, though, thus forming two imposing consoles, thanks to which the house takes on an extremely dynamic look. Such solution seemingly pre-determines a strictly symmetrical composition – yet Roman Leonidov dexterously made it against the dictatorship of geomentry:he shifted the consoles in respect to one another and moved the entrance over to the right, while the huge rectangular stained-glass piece was placed right next to the protruding volume of the dining room.The asymmetry of the main façade is skillfully enhanced with the choice of the materials:most of it, including the entrance portal, is decorated with light stone, while the protruding volume is faced with brown wood. The ground floor of the house contains the public premises, the second – the owners’ bedroom and the children’s rooms, including the game room.Shifting the main entrance off the central axis made it possible to lay the stress of the entire composition of the spacious double-height drawing-room.The ground floor also houses the kitchen, the dining room, and the cloak-room.And - the main entrance has a direct connection to the swimming pool that is annexed to the house from the backyard side:the gallery that also leads to it is formally considered to be part of the drawing room but it is only marked by a mosaic pattern while the drawing room has a wooden floor.Also, the drawing room can be mentally split into a few sub-areas:part of it is occupied by the fireplace, and the other part is the place for the cozy sofas and a plasma television.Olga Budennaya admits that the considerable area of this place necessitated for a rigid framework that would “support” the entire volume.Such framework is presented by the order system:the columns are flanking the elegant-looking staircase with slender cast-iron banisters, while the ceiling is dissected into several segments with the help of an ornamented frieze. It the swimming pool room, just like in the rooms on the second floor (except for the bedroom), the indispensable part of the design is the roof construction with its unconventional rafter system.And, while this solution certainly helped the children’s rooms look more colorful and natural, when it came to the swimming pool it brought about the necessity to somehow conceal the ventilation ducts.And so the architects placed the communications on the wall, but, in order to avoid making it look ugly with the pipes and boxes, gave it a wave-like shape. . Text by: Anna Martovitskaya