Many city dwellers face a similar dilemma. On warm days they yearn for a place to enjoy the sun, but their apartment doesn't have a balcony or access to a garden. The solution for some Scandinavians is to lease a nearby allotment plot that's just large enough to accommodate a tiny cottage. Young Norwegian architect, Tommie Wilhelmsen (30) did just this, but with a radically modern solution.
Based on Wilhelmsen´s own design and built with his own hands (with help from his father), the resulting tiny summerhouse and surrounding garden are perfect for enjoying the long evenings of the Scandinavian summer or for a quicker visit with a bottle of wine and a good book.
Allotments in Scandinavia are owned and administered by local city councils. Plots are rented out for a small yearly cost but are becoming ever more popular and increasingly hard to come by. Scandinavian allotment gardens tend to have smaller plots than their European counterpart and the huts are usually small and traditional. Wilhelmsen´s new cottage is a dramatic new entry to the scene.
We liked his approach to solving an urban romantic´s dilemma and the fact that the project was both low budget and ecologically sound.
The 19m2 hut (24 m2 if you include the “bedroom” that stretches out over the garden) was designed and constructed for a total of less than €12,000. The surprisingly spacious living room with open plan kitchen has been kept simple and all white. There are no cupboards or bulky kitchen fixtures to clutter up the design of the kitchen. Cooking actually takes place on the grill outside.
The exterior is covered in stained plywood and pine. All doors and windows are built from salvaged parts and the kitchen is a plain worktop made from old kitchen cabinets. With the communal baths and washing facilities of the colony close by, indoor plumbing was luckily not necessary. The overall look is minimalist and polished but this being a DIY project, the architect claims there are a few rough edges and a rather rustic feel to the place.
According to Wilhelmsen, designing a low-budget hut offered a surprising amount of freedom. As a design project, there was more room to play around with the different architectural elements than he’s been used to during regular commercial projects.
Tommie Wilhelmsen graduated in 2000 from the Bergen School of Architecture and set up a professional studio in Stavanger, on the west coast of Norway. Earlier this year, Wilhelmsen was one of six architects invited to join an exhibition of young Norwegian architects in Ferrarra, Italy.
Basic elements like wind, terrain, sun, rain and climate provide the foundation of much of Wilhelmsen's work with each of his buildings being designed for one specific spot on the planet. “The projects are developed not only for practical planning purposes, but also for visual research. The playful, naïve, optimistic and useless have just as big a value in the design process as the logical and practical. It’s essential to believe that a good house can change your life. Good architecture is a place that is never easy to leave.”
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