Do you ever daydream about having a room that can open up to let the fresh air and sunlight into your home" It could be a sunroom brimming with a lush array of houseplants, a lounge where you entertain guests, or a furnished open-air living room like the one they used to call a “lanai” on The Golden Girls. Typically, these designs are found in tropical or temperate locales, where people don?t have to worry about drafts seeping into their houses or particularly harsh winters.
To create such a transitory space in a colder part of the world, it seems like your walls would just have to disappear whenever you needed them to! If you’re like most people, then that sounds completely impossible to you. Even modern homes that have been equipped with sliding walls have to store them somewhere. Usually, that means overlapping the automatic walls with stationary ones or sacrificing some outdoor views. In an effort to solve this dilemma, Bergmeisterwolf Architekten has come up with a stunning alternative.
For “House F on Lake Garda,” a 250-square-meter extension of a 16th-century villa in Toscolano-Maderno, Italy, the firm created a series of sliding floor-to-ceiling windows that sink into the ground with the push of a button, turning an indoor space into a room that?s fully exposed to the elements. The design redefines what an indoor/outdoor space means by blurring the lines between the two areas more than ever before. Plus, it’s just plain fun ...