Need to keep something safe, but want to leave it on display? Just like a museum artifact, but on a much much larger scale, this boxy, two-story, glass-and-metal house contains an aged relic, preserving (while using) uncovered remnants from the elements.

A fitting home for an antique collector of any kind, to be sure, but this new construction by Architectural Bureau G.Natkevicius & Partners is particularly well-suited to the vintage books accumulated by the owner.

The client now has a new archive within the old masonry lodge, which was once part of a medieval cannon foundry that long ago stood on much of the now-flattened the site.

What was originally thought to be a derelict building not worth saving was revealed to have been built of ancient local bricks, of great historic value (not to mention visual interest!).

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As such, the new house was wrapped around the old with bedrooms above and below the main level and an open-plan,, glass-encased first floor.

From the architects:

“The customer is a banker and antique book collector. A four member family house. In the Middle Ages the area, where the building is situated, was a cannon foundry. Customers bought a site where stood the old yellow brick lodge with a basement. Cleaning the plaster of a house revealed that the lodge had been built by ancient bricks which were made in a old Vilnius brick factories. Because of a historical and physical value of a house were considered to preserve it by wrapping it with outer glass shape. Historical house structure have been carefully restored.”

“Library of a collection of ancient books equipped in the basement of historical lodge. On the ground floor- children’s bedrooms and in the attic- master bedrooms. At the glass shape zone in the basement we can find the Turkish bath with a rest rooms and a garage for two cars.”

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