the Hamra House in the woods of Gotland

Hamra in Swedish means "hammer", and is used to describe the underlying philosophy of constructing and organising the spaces of this very simple, yet intuitive house in the backwood country of the island of Gotland. The descriptive words come from the brief of the architectural office Dinell-Johansson, responsible for the realisation of the project : "… a house as simple as possible. Equally simple as the barn we wanted to convert to a summer dwelling, but which never showed up on the market: one open space with a large number of possible beds, cooking in the middle, washing facilities outside the house. Planing regulations ruled the placement of the house to the inner part of the plot which at the time of designing was still densly vegetated and scarcely accessible. Hence the house was designed with generic qualities, creating no front- or backside, treating all sides of the site equally. Four large openings 2,4x2m are placed according to rotational symmetry, one in each facade. Facing north is a fixed window, the other three are glazed doors. There is no hierarchy between the doors – anyone can be used as an entrance. Two roof windows add skylight to the interior."

The interior space is dominated by two plywood volumes which, in and above, offer space to play and to sleep. Around and between these volumes entrance, cooking, dining and living takes place. All serving functions are organized along a 90cm wide strip running through the house. All technical equipment and all water and drainage is located along this strip which limited the complexity of installation work. Spacial functions like stairs, storage, closets, bookshelf etc. are also located along the serving strip. In the middle there is the kitchen which consists of a 3,1mx0,9m concrete bench with an integrated fire-place. It is cast in situ and the cupboards are remaining parts of the cast. In this case the formwork plywood has been used for its actual purpose. The furniture is to a large extent assembled out of remaining our reused building material.

[Ref.] http://www.dinelljohansson.se/p/hamra.html

[Ref.] http://www.architizer.com/en_us/projects/view/hamra/22760/#.UYfrgKJTBqA