Garden No. 2 —
Limburg

A house with a large garden and, in the background, a small cabin. Our clients asked us to redesign the cabin and add a swimming pool – a summer area in the garden.

The new cabin retains the footprint and general shape of the previous one – a rectangular plan covered by an open-gable roof – but the layout, design and materiality change substantially. The rhododendron, almost right up against the cabin, is kept. The pool, longer than the cabin, is centred with a large terrace that frames cabin and rhododendron.

We decided from the outset that the pool should be clad in stone; or rather, that the pool, terrace and cabin, inside and out, should be marble, like the oldest baths we've seen in Rome and Istanbul, and we worked on these materials so as not to detract from the cabin's original grace.

The builder, sensibly, protested: he didn't think it was possible to transpose material and construction solutions from Portugal to Belgium. With the help of the builder of ‘Garden No. 1 – Delgada’, we managed to convince him. And since he is an excellent builder, he did nothing less than the best he could.

All the marble is extracted, cut and treated in Portugal: grey marble for the interior of the pool, and white marble for the terrace, wall cladding and fittings.

The cabin cuts a very sharp silhouette out of the dark green background; the pool is seen as a blue-green mirror.