His first built house in almost 30 years, this expertly calibrated, brilliantly compact house in Austria joins a rare list of the master architect designed by Rem Koolhaas' private residential projects – the last one, the Maison à Bordeaux, was completed in 1998 and was preceded by the Dutch House in 1995, and the Villa dall’Ava in 1991. All have been hailed as masterpieces.
But for a second, forget who designed this sharp, white box of an Austrian home that juts out of the lusciously green hillside of Zeller See in the Austrian Alps, where the views and scenes unfold as such: At daybreak, fog rises from the tranquil lake, creeping into the quiet village on its western shore. The midday sun pierces passing clouds, light and shadow playing in chiaroscuro over the mountain landscape. Later, an afternoon sun shower dampens the valley; the rooftops glisten and the surface of the lake glimmers.
This serene vista is witnessed in uninterrupted detail from this compact house in Austria. Created in collaboration with Italian architect Federico Pompignoli, this abode marks a surprising evolution in the career of one of the world’s most celebrated designers.
Planning for this unusual project began over a dinner six years ago. No sooner had the client revealed that he owned a microscopic, perhaps unbuildable, hillside plot near his hometown than Koolhaas had proposed a project, intrigued by the challenge. It was a relief, the client recalls, from the megaprojects that have become standard fare for Koolhaas’s firm OMA, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. Measured against his considerable oeuvre, this comparatively small structure – which measures around 3,000 square feet – undoubtedly ranks among the architect’s greatest investments of time per square foot. Koolhaas presented his plans for the house in person at the town hall. “The city architect hailed it as the most significant building in Zell am See since the church,” the client recalls. “St. Hippolyt was built in 1215.”
Glimpsed from the town, this compact house designed by Rem Koolhaas resembles an outcrop of white marble emerging from the hillside. After a winter snowfall, it is all but invisible. Slipped between two squat, Alpine-style buildings along a narrow drive, the structure occupies a steep site scarcely more than 40 feet wide, the former side yard of the house next door. After subtracting borders required by the local building code – a little over 13 feet on either side – the resulting mass is a narrow tower rising from the street, much of its bulk buried, like an iceberg, within the hillside.
“How can an underground house enable the penetration of daylight and views that are crucial for living?” Koolhaas asks, neatly summarising the project’s fundamental contradiction. “It meant that the sectioning of the house was critical,” he continues, referring to the structure’s intricately stacked levels. Above ground, the house’s white concrete cladding has a lustrous, porcelain-like finish.
The bottom of the house sits at street level. Turning a key in the discreet entryway prompts the large metal door to pivot silently inward, revealing three-and-a-half flights of stairs rising straight ahead. These are parallel to – but never touch – a luminous wall covered in what resembles silver insulation foil, evoking Andy Warhol’s aluminium-foil-lined Factory. To the left, a room lined in warm okoume wood offers a place to store ski boots and jackets. Here, street shoes are traded for soft felt slippers, which also help to protect the home’s immaculate, pale resin floors.
Climbing the staircase is akin to an Alpine hike in miniature: each level of the house delivers a corresponding vista. One flight up, rubber flaps divide the stairwell from a double-height sitting room. This tall space is framed by opposing walls that loom like sheer cliffs. The floor runs outward to a terrace.
Indoors and outside are divided by two broad panes of glass, which span the space’s full width. The turn of a hidden knob causes the bottom panel to slide smoothly upward, opening the room to the fresh air. Twin guest suites – containing two snug bedrooms with plush faux-fur walls, each with its own wood-panelled bathroom – lie behind the sitting room, burrowed into the hillside.
At the lakeside end of the space, a wood-faced wall serves as the backdrop for a stainless-steel kitchen with the cool polish of a minimalist sculpture. An antique suppenbrunzer – a blown-glass sphere containing a carved-wood dove, one of the homeowner’s prized possessions – is suspended above a Tulip dining table by Eero Saarinen, in accordance with old Germanic tradition.
Across from the kitchen, the ceiling rises above a large upholstered daybed strewn with cushions for lounging. To one side, structural glass plates support the translucent green of the floor above. On the other, a long skylight opens onto the upper yard. A trapezoidal opening cut high into the concrete walls offers a glimpse into the sauna and adjacent shower.
In the opposite corner, a short run of steps leads up to a darkened corridor that tunnels deeper into the hillside. A 90-degree turn at the end of this passageway reveals a steep and narrow staircase, and, on the landing, a sturdy door. Crossing this threshold, the space stretches spectacularly forward. Like stepping into a giant telescope, the house’s roofline rises and falls along its length, rhythmically pushing one space into the next: from bedroom to bathroom to living room to terrace. The whole is startlingly spartan in nature: a limited palette of materials unifies the expanse, in contrast to the collage-like quality of the architect’s early work. “I’ve become increasingly sceptical of the compulsion to differentiate,” Koolhaas admits. “Now, I value reduction of the repertoire, but also the intensification of experience.”
A Marcel Breuer–designed tubular steel writing desk and chair, and a freestanding mattress, are all that occupy the lofty sleeping area. The architect has distilled the adjacent bathroom to a set of bare surfaces. The flip of a switch causes two glass floor hatches to open, revealing a bathtub and shower basin – both submerged to preserve the pristine view. Across from the bathtub, a long glass wall pivots easily by hand, enabling a portion of the house to open outward, fanlike, towards the lake.
A sky-blue curtain by British-Dutch designer Petra Blaisse can be drawn between the sleeping area and the living space; a circular “oculus” in the fabric adds another lens to the optical array.
At the far end, a pair of mechanical platforms can rise from the floor to create a dining table, or sink downwards to form a conversation pit. A broad glass panel slides up into the ceiling to give access to a terrace, which offers the residence’s most expansive view of all. Here, the architecture slips away in quiet deference to the flawless landscape.
This house represents a different scale and pace of practice for an architect famous for dozens of big buildings in big cities, known even for defining the concept of “bigness” itself in a 1995 essay. In the late 1990s boom, clients approached Koolhaas to design grand residences. “Large scale is very difficult to capture in the formula of a house,” he explains. “What attracted me to this project was the narrow, small site – it would be impossible to create a big house here. That condition liberated me to do a house again.”
The small looms large here. The structure is full of enigmatic details, but consider just three: a cast-concrete bench on the south façade, a folded-metal roof scupper, which allows rainwater to drain off the roof, and a circular void cut into the eaves of the floating terrace. These simple gestures register a new architectural regard for living in nature: a place to sit and rest, a path for water to flow, and an opening for the sun to enter. The architect’s long-running research project on the rural culminated in his blockbuster exhibition Countryside, The Future at New York City’s Guggenheim Museum in 2020, but its influence on Koolhaas’s architecture is only now coming into focus.
