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Architect: Peter Pichler Architecture
Status: built
Type: residential units
Client: Angela Sabine Staffler
Photography: Oskar Da Riz, Nicolò Degiorgis
About Studio
Peter Pichler Architecture is an award winning laboratory for architecture based in Milan.
We are a young, dynamic and experimental team dedicated to developing an innovative and contemporary approach to architecture.
Understanding tradition is the key to radical evolution. Hence, we incorporate close familiarity with local culture and respect for the natural environment into every single project. This credo builds our studio’s foundations and reflects the way we work. Our vision and team are the pillars of our success.
The Mirror Houses are a pair of holiday homes, set in the marvelous surroundings of the South Tyrolean Dolomites, amidst a beautiful scenery of appletrees, just outside the city of Bolzano. They were designed by architect Peter Pichler. The Mirror houses offer a unique chance to spend a beautiful vacation surrounded by the contemporary architecture of the highest standards and the most astonishing Landscape and beauty nature has to offer.
The client, who lives in a restructured farmhouse of the 60s on the site, asked to design a structure for renting out luxury holiday units. Guests have their small autonomous apartments and can fully enjoy the experience of living in the middle of nature. A maximum degree of privacy for both the client and the residing guest should be taken into consideration.
The new structure is oriented towards the east with their private garden and autonomous access and parking for the guests. Each unit contains a kitchen/living room as well as a bath- and bedroom with big skylights that open to allow natural light and ventilation. A small basement serves as temporary storage.
The project’s initial volume is split into 2 units that are slightly shifted in height and length in order to loosen the entire structure and articulate each unit.
Both units are floating on a base above the ground evoking lightness besides offering better views from their cantilevering terraces to the impressive surrounding landscape. The volume opens towards the east with a big glass facade that fades with curvilinear lines into the black aluminum shell. The mirrored glass on the west facade borders the garden of the client with the units and catches the surrounding panorama while making the units almost invisible. The mirrored glass is laminated with a UV coating preventing birds collision.
From certain views of the client’s garden the old existing farmhouse is mirrored in the new contemporary architecture and is literally blending into it rather than competing against it.
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