Old and New / House and Garden

Description: Restoration, Alterations and Additions to existing 1940’s House and Garden

Location: Mezaparks, Riga, Latvia

Year: Completed 2009

(Original House was designed by Lidija Hofmane Grinberga and built 1933)

Project Credits: Dickson Francis Architecture

Project Idea

The Existing house was designed as a pavilion within the garden. Local Latvian planning law generally only permits one out-building or garage on the site, however two out-buildings were added to this house and approved at different stages in the 1980's during Soviet occupation when houses like these were poorly altered and restructured to accommodate more than one family. This created an opportunity for an alternative pattern to the singular pavilion in the garden. Building on the footprint of two outbuildings allowed us to create a new focus and addition as a courtyard to define a new sequence of garden spaces or rooms on the site.

With this intention, we further worked with and built upon the latent patterns of existing house, its character, sequence of spaces and materials, ground, walls and roof, to make a collection of related structures honoring the garden. We designed the new outbuildings, guest house to the southwest and pool house with sauna and outdoor room to the south east to help define a formal front garden and an informal courtyard and garden room.

We designed the courtyard room like a garden wall ruin to create a common ground with the red brick entry and foundation walls of the existing house. The brick walls with timber screens, pergolas and trellises mask and frame aspects of the site and surrounding context. Green rooves to both outbuildings worked to further ground the structures and integrate with the landscape when viewed from the upper levels of the house and the new terrace above the verandah room.

The plan and elevation of the existing house and garden suggests a diagonal direction on arrival from front door to the existing verandah room. We extended this idea to the sequence of movement within the garden room with the making of a new garden stair that acts like a hinge between the guest house and the pool house towards the undercover outdoor room with an open-hearth fireplace and window borrowing views of the neighboring gardens beyond.