One older and another more recent house are located in the village’s southeast, on the edge of a plateau gathering the buildings of a small hamlet. Their faces enjoy a view over a meadow-covered terrace giving to the valley of the Bregenzer Ach river. The mighty Kanisfluh stands in the south. The house’s design takes this privileged landscape location into account with an upper floor accommodating a residential area, the frontal two thirds of which are glazed on three sides. The house responds to its surroundings - with the hillside location with the panoramic view above the plateau in the valley below, the integration of the massive, old walnut tree between old and new, the dialogue with the adjoining house in the woods, the subtle rotation away from the existing building to thus create the lightness of a hamlet typical for the region.

A flatly pitched saddle roof draws its protective shield far out to cover the terrace placed in front. In the rear part above the Schopf-like an entrance structural walls rise up to the roof, defining a more intimate residential zone that gives to the northwest through a sliding window-wall. The ground floor is more withdrawn. A series of four north-east oriented high-slender windows increase the protective cover’s effect, showing an outermost layer of horizontally bolted larch-lathing. Their modest dimensions, the little distance and a fair-faced closing at the building’s edges together give a planar impression, a texture more than a structure-like grid.

These windows appear like mats dangling loosely in air-permeable weightlessness, yet corporeally compact. No references are visible to a bearing system or underlying layers. The construction method, the materials and the heating system are testimony to the client’s ecological approach. The timber construction is clad with silver fir both on the in and outside. As an unsegmented solitaire, the structure is placed autonomously upon the pasture. In typological terms, the location and relationship to the landscape correspond to those of huts or haylofts scattered upon the well-groomed alpine meadow. Here, too, agriculturally utilized area and the house’s wall immediately adjoin each other.

Neither the front garden, the fence, nor outbuildings modify the clear setting. On the inside, dark nut-wood floors contrast with the white walls and fallow spruce veneer. The somber ground shade stabilizes the atmosphere into agreeable security, from which one is introduced to the panorama of a broad, diversified woodland.

(Walter Zschokke, 2001)