KATOxVictoria

Lucky House . Jutland

KATOxVictoria

Lucky House is an allotment garden house for a family of 3 in the outskirts of Copenhagen.

“Lucky House” is actually the name of the client’s existing pavilion. Today Lucky House is a temporary solution comprising two old sheds from somewhere in southern Jutland, Denmark.
It was our task to catch the sensitivity of old and the “make-to-do” and “build-yourself” smell of the area.
Lucky House is already a big house compared to your average allotment garden pavilion. With time allotments in Denmark are shifting. From being a mere tool shed you visited in the weekends for a breath of fresh air and to tighten up the vegetable garden, the allotment pavilions are now becoming regular summerhouses where the family moves to enjoy the summer holidays.

With this project we wanted to preserve the richness of the small spaces.
We wanted to create a colony of garden houses, within the colony of garden houses.
So we decided that our job was not to invent something, but rather to redistribute what they already had; spaciously and material wise
Thus we chopped up the programs into mono functional rooms and distributed them throughout the garden. Before the house and the garden were two very separated entities but in this way garden pockets take shape around and in-between the houses. Here everyday life can spill out and connect the house in a continuous flow.

We have decided to reuse to material from the existing Lucky House. The classic black painted wooden facades with the crooked white window frames will be cut and assembled according to the new layout.
We like to call this “nostalgic sustainability”. You will find the entrance door continuing its job in a new place, the morning terrace is still catching the sunrise in its old position but connecting to a new room and you will wake up looking at the same wood knots in the ceiling above you.
As we talked to the client we noticed the way he described the house as something, which was opened up during the warm season and closed down again when the cold weather arrived.
We played around with this turn of speech and arrived at the idea of opening and closing the facades themselves simultaneously with creating the many small pavilions.
The houses are opened up during the summer and closed up during the winter. When they are opened the facades start to connect with the other houses and create niches and courtyards in the garden.