refuge house

Cool and contemporary, this faux-floating wooden space extends a classic stone home out onto the adjacent water – yet at the same time this structural expansion manages to provide a calm and comfortable setting for lounging in luxury over the lake on this lush, luxurious, well-landscaped yet rural and rustic private property.

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floating vacation home interior

Wim Goes Architectuur is a design firm with a talent for finding the sublime in simple materials, and matching new home additions to existing contexts without making them seem like something false inserted into the history of a site or landscape.

house with dock

Horizontal wooden floor boards and roof beams run above and below as one walks out on this water-going platform of this wooden house, while vertical see-through wood slats let in light from the sides and draw the eye upward and outward to the surrounding blue skies.

refuge wooden slats

A secondary open dock juts out to one side while the primary enclosed volume contains a central wood-burning stove and space for a family picnic out by the waterside, open to winds but largely protected from outside rain.

“The Flemish farmlands evoke memories and feelings of tranquillity and simplicity. Refuge is a link between this landscape and architecture, but at the same time does not try to be one more than the other or anything new. A wooden floor is cantilevered over the pond. Wooden vertical beams are bearing the roof. On the roof red wood shingles leads the rain to red copper spouts giving back the water to the pond surrounding the pavilion. Like wood, red copper forms a patina, maturing with time to find its beauty.”

interior light
view from shore

“An inner space can be protected from winds, temperature and sound by sliding doors. The freedom to change the refuge with the change of nature, architecture becomes a kind of tool in between the landscape and the human presence. It’s a learning process to interact with the elements. The ever changing meteorological conditions will change the inhabitants and so the architecture. Living with nature is nor an esthetical question nor a formal behaviour. It’s a state of mind.”