A wood of trees, a house on a heath, a paddock of horses reveal this as the Böckman family’s stables, studio and home. It lies south of a hog’s-back ridge in open farm land, at Dalby east of Lund. Its architect, Per Friberg, is both a landscape architect and a professor in the subject, which can be sensed from his treatment of the land and the interplay between the buildings and their surroundings. The house’s form follows that of the heath. Its roof slopes as the land slopes. A pair of walls, white-washed in the Scanian manner and cutting into the curve of the heath, form the ground floor and support the heavy beams that carry the upper floor. A light glued-and-laminated wood structure, its volume is greater than that of the floor below.
The stables lie at the entrance to the property, where a slightly curving road with a watercourse and cultivated terraces on one side and a view over the untouched heath on the other leads up to the self-evident entrance to the house. The main building is divided into a part for work, a part for sleeping quarters, and a part with a kitchen and other general rooms. The first two parts, annexed to the general part, enclose an excavated and terraced courtyard. The slope of the ground makes the heath itself the fourth wall: the house has two storeys towards the inner yard but only one towards the fields. The landscape has been deliberately carried indoors. Windows go down to the floor and are located opposite one another along well-chosen lines of sight; one, for example, runs from the courtyard, through the house, and out over the fields. In summer, when the house is literally opened up along these axes, its terraces and external walls are a flood of fertile greenery. The property as a whole worthily represents Nordic functionalism, for in a matter-of-fact way it separates functions, demonstrates constructive principles aesthetically and clearly, and respects the importance of light and compass directions. This is all but a soulful view of nature, a romance of material, this house is a home built in wood cut from timber felled on its own land.
Its stables are in oak — one of the few materials that horses won’t eat — with oak logs 20 cm in diameter set on end in a bed of sand to provide an old-fashioned non-slip floor for the horses. Beeches from the property yielded wood for the staircases in the house and great twisty planks for its floors. Pine has been used in the ceiling, and a sort of pale oriental mahogany plywood for the walls. Externally, the house is clad with larch, a rather porous, greasy wood with a lively surface. The horizontal boarding follows the strict division of the house into modules but its regularity is balanced by the timber having been sawn in various widths — so as to get as many planks as possible from it. Corners exhibit the aesthetic of making do: their boarding is diagonal and uses timber that were too short to be used elsewhere.
A wood of trees, a house on a heath, a paddock of horses reveal this as the Böckman family’s stables, studio and home. It lies south of a hog’s-back ridge in open farm land, at Dalby east of Lund. Its architect, Per Friberg, is both a landscape architect and a professor in the subject, which can be sensed from his treatment of the land and the interplay between the buildings and their surroundings. The house’s form follows that of the heath. Its roof slopes as the land slopes. A pair of walls, white-washed in the Scanian manner and cutting into the curve of the heath, form the ground floor and support the heavy beams that carry the upper floor. A light glued-and-laminated wood structure, its volume is greater than that of the floor below.
The stables lie at the entrance to the property, where a slightly curving road with a watercourse and cultivated terraces on one side and a view over the untouched heath on the other leads up to the self-evident entrance to the house. The main building is divided into a part for work, a part for sleeping quarters, and a part with a kitchen and other general rooms. The first two parts, annexed to the general part, enclose an excavated and terraced courtyard. The slope of the ground makes the heath itself the fourth wall: the house has two storeys towards the inner yard but only one towards the fields. The landscape has been deliberately carried indoors. Windows go down to the floor and are located opposite one another along well-chosen lines of sight; one, for example, runs from the courtyard, through the house, and out over the fields. In summer, when the house is literally opened up along these axes, its terraces and external walls are a flood of fertile greenery. The property as a whole worthily represents Nordic functionalism, for in a matter-of-fact way it separates functions, demonstrates constructive principles aesthetically and clearly, and respects the importance of light and compass directions. This is all but a soulful view of nature, a romance of material, this house is a home built in wood cut from timber felled on its own land.
Its stables are in oak — one of the few materials that horses won’t eat — with oak logs 20 cm in diameter set on end in a bed of sand to provide an old-fashioned non-slip floor for the horses. Beeches from the property yielded wood for the staircases in the house and great twisty planks for its floors. Pine has been used in the ceiling, and a sort of pale oriental mahogany plywood for the walls. Externally, the house is clad with larch, a rather porous, greasy wood with a lively surface. The horizontal boarding follows the strict division of the house into modules but its regularity is balanced by the timber having been sawn in various widths — so as to get as many planks as possible from it. Corners exhibit the aesthetic of making do: their boarding is diagonal and uses timber that were too short to be used elsewhere.
