The floor slab is stepped to feel as though it is part of the land, encouraging occupants to engage with the site’s natural slope. Walls and floors are angled to frame views of the mountains, guiding movement through the house dynamically — open and expansive in shared areas, more intimate in private zones.

Large openings to the east capture cool summer breezes sweeping up the hill, while sliding screens provide control over wind, sun, shade, and privacy. A sheltered outdoor terrace doubles as the main circulation path, heightening awareness of the ever-changing weather and light. A generous opening to the north of the terrace allows winter sun to penetrate deep into the interior, warming the polished concrete slab through thermal mass. Glass sliding doors and screens offer flexibility to partition the house into distinct zones or open it entirely for gatherings. The layout separates everyday living areas from private spaces, with utility cores such as the pantry and bathrooms in between, creating an intricate weave of open pathways and quiet corners throughout the home.

The house acknowledges its connection to the site’s history, the neighbourhood, and the landscape — challenging conventional notions of dwelling through spatial play and delight.

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The continuity and thickness of the envelope take advantage of the material’s thermal mass to moderate climatic fluctuations, delaying heat gain and generating more stable interior conditions. In this way, the material works in concert with the climate, reducing dependence on artificial systems while reinforcing an introspective mode of dwelling.

The morphology of the volume responds directly to the organisational scheme of the house. The elevated portion accommodates the children’s bedrooms on the first floor and, above them, the main bedroom on the second floor, the only room that engages the landscape from that height. At the opposite end of the volume are the service spaces and the elements that define the kitchen. Between these two poles unfolds the social core of the house.

A screen of perforated concrete blocks completes the system, filtering light, views, and ventilation. Rather than denying the exterior, it distances and mediates it, providing shade and privacy.

Thus, the material not only responds to environmental and structural imperatives, but also actively contributes to the construction of a domestic intimacy that stands in contrast to the idealised transparency of the surrounding landscape.

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The name “findling” holds a dual meaning in German: both “orphan” and “glacial erratic.” Architect Vincent Appel borrowed the term after a visiting philosopher friend identified the supporting stones as findlings. Literally, the home is built atop four such boulders, their mass holding the structure lightly above the land. Metaphorically, the term expresses a process of emotional restoration and rediscovery—an architectural effort intended to heal and reset the clients’ relationship to this site and to the act of building itself.

From the approach, the home appears to float just above the terrain. A slender stainless-steel stair—the project’s “third space”—descends from the structure, bridging the distance between forest floor and elevated platform. Doors and stairs typically provide the minimum articulation between inside and out; here, the stair is designed to expand that threshold into a heightened perceptual experience. Engineered through finite-element digital analysis, the stair is reduced to its thinnest possible expression, reading as neither of the earth nor of the building. Custom-perforated treads and a ribbon-like handrail introduce unfamiliar yet tactile cues, encouraging awareness that one is stepping from the familiar path in the woods into something intentionally other.

Rather than an exterior entry sequence terminating at a front door, visitors arrive directly into the center of the house, entering through its heart to communicate the feeling of an embrace. The plan is symmetrical yet varied in spatial experience. Two compact bedrooms and one bath occupy the corners—each with a large fixed window and operable wooden shutters—recalling the scale and spirit of a treehouse bunk. The central living and dining space expands outward with floor-to-ceiling glass, creating an alternating rhythm of compression and release inspired by regional mountaineering lodges and backcountry cabins.

Materially, the house is elemental and singular. The structure is built almost entirely from larch harvested from nearby forests, chosen for its durability, warmth, economy, and spiritual clarity. To minimize complexity and material footprint, windows are mulled directly into solid larch jambs and glazed on site. Portions of the wall pivot open for ventilation, eliminating the need for mechanical hardware or framed openings. Opening a window becomes not a technical mechanism but a physical gesture—an intimate act of participation with climate and landscape.

Half of the building rests on a historic New England stone wall likely constructed between 1770 and 1830 when the land was first cleared for farming. Now buried within the forest, these walls are quiet artifacts of regional history, tying the retreat into a continuum of habitation.

Throughout the interior, details are guided by restraint: the kitchen island is carved from a single block of Vermont Verde serpentine quarried in Barre, Vermont—the same quarry that supplied Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building planters. Its deep green veining was left unpolished to feel like a fragment of hillside drifted indoors. Door and shutter hardware fabricated by Ize reinterprets Le Corbusier’s La Tourette monastery handles, here cast in stainless steel to match the home’s material palette.

The Findling is both dwelling and transformation. Resting on ancient stones, lifted by the lightness of wood, and reached through a suspended metal passage, it is less an addition to the land than a rediscovery of it—an architecture designed to move perception from the subliminal to the supraliminal, inviting an emotional relationship with place.

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Simple timber-lined spaces provide the basics for living oriented toward the outdoors. A small open fireplace with a garden view offers reprieve from the coastal winds in one space. With a long foot-to-foot single-level bunk trimmed in tarnished brass in another room, colloquially referred to as the ship’s cabin.

Furnished with soft open-weave natural linens, woven surfaces, timbers, and a collection of books and found objects, the spaces speak to a calm beach holiday and are designed to actively combat the ever-present assault from the sand.

The bathrooms are approached with a rigour in simplicity, a direct response to the trials that beach house wet areas are put through. A heavy-gauge galvanised steel trough forming a deep vanity surrounded by a simple white porcelain tiles in one, and a shallow stainless steel wash plane cut into the textured mosaic tiles of the other.

This small building project slowly developed its own quiet, individual, and curious architectural language that appears throughout in subtle moments and details. It’s timber/ steel/ glass, come bushfire regulation inspired ( ehhe), window solution fronts a very raw, warm, and friendly place. It is a lovely project to have authored and one that will age and grow into its landscape in the years to come.

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Floor-to-ceiling, simply beautiful, double-leaf wooden windows allow light and warmth to fall on the seamless floor and also provide the necessary retreat in this urban context. Plants, hammocks, and furniture enliven the veranda architecture and lend the design lightness, homeliness, and comfort. Wooden separating elements between the verandas ensure privacy between the individual residential units. Outdoor curtains, with their fabric texture, give the private outdoor spaces a high recreational and residential value.

The heart of the outdoor space is formed by the two greenhouses with a well and sandbox. A large meadow stretches out next to them. Lushly planted flowerbeds punctually complete the overall picture. Along Wiesenstrasse, the street-typical planting is continued with a row of trees.

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The patio serves as the home’s new center. It brings in air and filtered light, offers shade and coolness in the summer months and introduces an unexpected layer of privacy behind the protected façade. It is through this open void that the house is now entered. Behind it, two new storeys were added within the existing volume: living spaces on the ground floor, workspaces above.

Built with standard materials and modest means, Casa Verri proposes an alternative model of transformation: one where subtraction holds more potential than addition.

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The blocks for the top floor, bearing less load, are made of 100% lime concrete, while the rest of the floors combine lime with cement. These blocks, approximately 135 cm long, 42 cm high, and with variable widths for each floor (64, 54, 44, and 34 cm), were prefabricated once the demolition was completed, before commencing the construction of the new building. This approach significantly reduced the construction duration. The blocks were stacked to build load-bearing walls perpendicular to the street, supporting cross-laminated timber ceilings. On each floor, the walls reduce in thickness by 10 cm, allowing direct support of the timber panels, facilitating the speed of execution of the entire structure.

Perpendicular to the main walls, 13 cm thick partition walls, constructed with the same cyclopean concrete and resulting from cutting a 60 cm wide block into four 13 cm sections, tie the structure of the entire building, together with the stair and elevator core.

The entire spatial and programmatic organization of the building responds to the described structural system; the floor plan is organized with a stair core in the corner, providing access to a walkway in the interior garden, from where each apartment is accessed—all are through apartments except those on the semi-basement floor, which, like those on the attic floor, have half the depth of the typical floors and utilize two structural spans for each apartment. The top-floor apartments have large terraces. Each floor also has a communal area (laundry room, lounges, etc.). The façade starkly displays the structural system: the end walls (vertical) of the prefabricated block walls, which decrease in height on each floor and support the timber (horizontal) ceilings, and, as the façade of each apartment, floor-to-ceiling wooden balconies with a lateral opaque strip and Venetian blinds to protect from the eastern and western sun.

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The presence of two architectural elements on the upper elevation highlights the construction: To the north, a volume in silvered glass houses the garage and the entrance hall of the house. To the south, resting on the angle of the ground floor façade, a white, opaque, low, square box-shaped volume protects and forms a porch area that extends the living space to the exterior.

These two elements, contrasting in terms of geometry and materials, rest on different parts of the garden which fills the entire plot, and reorganise the relationship of the land and its exisiting structures (stone walls, neighbouring buildings) with the landscape.

The absence of a visible construction, enhanced by the reflection of the mirrored body which punctuates the plot’s geometrical centre, contrasts with the generosity of the interior spaces which are discovered as one climbs down, revealing a typologically recognisable house.

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A politically committed and militant project!

The nucleus is resolved by using a wall of compacted earth blocks (CEB). The block is distributed through 3 large units adapted to the program; it generates open spaces for storage or facilities, enclosed spaces with their own program, and passage spaces that interconnect or separate areas. At the same time, in order not to alter the original stone walls, the block concentrates all the installations of the cohousing.

In terms of comfort, this large earth block provides a high hygroscopic property, which compensates the low capacity of existing stone walls to humidity regulation. In addition, it compensates part of the thermal inertia that is lost through the thermal insulation of the existing façades on its interior side.

Text provided by the architects.