casa quattro

THE HOUSE OF WOOD, STRAW AND CORK Casa Quattro, designed by LCA architetti (Luca Compri Architects), is a sustainable house with an extremely simple architecture. It stands in a small village near Milan. The owners are a young couple of IT professionals who decided to live and work in close contact with nature. The building sits on the edge of the village and looks onto a small acacia wood. The ground floor holds the entrance, the kitchen, a bedroom, a study, two bathrooms, a laundry room and a large living room; the raised floor holds a small gym, a bedroom, a bathroom and a study overlooking the living room. At the heart of the house is a double-height space full of natural light, fully glazed to the north and partly to the south, so as to open a direct dialogue with the landscape, free of walls blocking the view. The unique and wonderful spectacle of the sky, the countryside and the wood is a constant presence in the daily life of the house and of the people who live in it. Outside, the simplicity of the composition recalls the small farmhouses and barns of the Lombard countryside, making the house a primitive building stripped of every non-essential element. Nature also guided the choice of building materials: timber for the structure, rice straw and cork as insulation; interior finishes and furniture are in stone and oak. The only decorative "whim" is the surface treatment of the exposed cork insulation outside: the panels were 3D-milled and decorated in an eccentric way, in sharp but deliberate contrast with the humble spirit of the house. The surface treatment and the naturalness of the material make the façades lively and vibrant with light. The intention was to ennoble materials that are very humble in themselves, cork and straw, and to bring out their unique qualities not only in terms of sustainability, efficiency and durability but above all of beauty. The building powers itself through passive and active solar energy, bringing consumption and CO2 emissions to zero; the materials used are almost entirely natural and can easily be recycled at the end of the building's life. The wish of both the architect and the clients was to work on a bio-ecological, ethically sound project, with a simple and natural soul and a bare, almost primitive architecture.