Story
When Nature Decides
Therese Fritzell and Simon Verstraete
When nature sets the playing field, all you can do is play along. The house in Trångsund, Sweden, is built into an 8-metre-high rock face. Instead of trying to remove part of the mountain, the owners wanted the house to blend into its surroundings.
We visit the home of architects Therese Fritzell and Simon Verstraete. The couple met in 2010 when they were both working in Grenoble, France, and ever since, they have been partners both in life and through their shared interest in architecture. Together they run Fritzell / Verstraete, an architecture and design studio.
“As architects, it was also about practising what we preach. By designing our own home, we could learn so much more than we ever could from sitting behind the drawing board,” says Therese.
As you move around the house, you feel how present nature is everywhere. The large windows in the kitchen and living room can open up completely, so in summer the lines between inside and outside are blurred – it all feels like one big space. Therese and Simon’s daughter has a lot of fun bouncing on the huge net laid out next to the terrace. “The idea came about because the terraces are built on pillars, and a large space suddenly appeared between them. It ended up being one of our best ideas,” explains Therese.
The kitchen is kept entirely white to let the furniture and the nature outside take over the space. Next to the kitchen is a table that Therese designed as a surprise for her husband, Simon. She found a 100-kilogram ash plank, stained it brown and let the natural grain of the wood determine the shape of the table. At the other end of the room is the living area, where two Playtower sofas in an orange-terracotta colour add a warm embrace to the room.
“This is a house that could not be placed anywhere else in the world but here,” says Simon. “It is not an engineer-built project; it is a home.”
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Design: Jens Juul Eilersen
