Couple bring Nordic dream to life with architect-designed ‘holiday house’

Lise Coirier was standing in the middle of a curious circular house, looking out at the rugged landscape of eastern Spain. The Belgium-based art historian, magazine publisher and (with her husband, Gian Giuseppe Simeone) gallery owner buttonholed her longtime friend Kersten Geers, who had designed the building with his business partner, David Van Severen.

As Geers recalls it, “Lise said mysteriously, ‘If we ever do a holiday house, we want you guys to do it.’”

Over the next six years, the pals-turned-collaborators have found their way from that concrete-and-glass enclosure about two hours from Barcelona, Spain, to a very different house in an altogether different place: central Sweden. There, the duo from OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen has just wrapped up work on the couple’s new vacation home, an elegant, enigmatic box the designers call 25 Columns. For all the distance between them, the two structures — one a bagel on a mesa, the other a forest-bound cube — remain deeply connected. “Somehow there’s this parallel,” Van Severen said.

The project that first fired Simeone’s and Coirier’s imaginations represented a major milestone for its architects, whose Brussels studio has been well regarded by design-world insiders since its founding in 2002. Eight years into their joint practice, Van Severen and Geers were awarded the Silver Lion for most promising young participants at the Venice Architecture Biennale. A series of prominent commissions followed, including a housing complex in Paris and a media center in Switzerland.

But the 2,000-square-foot house in the remote Spanish region of Matarraña presented the practice with an opportunity no public client (and few private ones) ever would. The project’s developers “basically gave us carte blanche,” Van Severen said, a chance for the architects to strut their avant-garde stuff.

They opted, characteristically, for restraint. Solo House, as the project is called, is a 150-foot-diameter loop, perforated at intervals by voids and recesses. At its center is a half-wild courtyard, whose brushy surroundings make it strangely in sync with the interior space. As Geers described it, “The difference between inside and outside becomes ambiguous.” Although that can often be a goal for many architects, the accomplishment of Solo House was aided by the vast plateau upon which it appears almost to hover.

The encounter with Solo House convinced Simeone and Coirier that OFFICE could bring their Nordic dream to life.

“My father is Italian, but my mother is from Stockholm,” said Simeone, 58, who’s been married to French-born Coirier, 53, since 1997. “We’ve gotten in the habit of going to Sweden once or twice a year.” (Together, he and Coirier founded the Spazio Nobile design studio in Brussels. Simeone, an archaeologist, also consults on cultural issues for the European Commission.) With their strong connection to the Swedish countryside, the pair had been giving serious consideration to building their own getaway there, a place to enjoy with their two daughters, who are now 22 and 25.

“David knows the area,” said Coirier, who had spent time with Van Severn at the Simeone clan’s previous house in Sweden some years earlier. The architects’ familiarity with the locale as well as with the family seemed to make them an obvious choice — though there were challenges, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic prevented the team from traveling to the hillside plot the clients had acquired outside the tiny village of Tallberg.

“We designed the project without visiting the site,” Geers said. “We only saw it in pictures.” At just over half an acre, the parcel was far more compact than the one in Matarraña, as well as more hemmed in by its neighbors, most of them gabled Swedish cottages of traditional red clapboard.

And then there was the interpersonal aspect. “It can be very difficult sometimes to work with friends,” Coirier observed. To avoid potential conflict, she and Simeone agreed to the same terms as their counterparts in Spain, giving OFFICE full rein to do as it saw fit.

Absent any other constraints, the designers began with the facts on the ground gathered from photos and Van Severen’s previous sojourns. On the one hand, there was the water: In a country of lakes, Siljan in the rural Dalarna province is one of Sweden’s largest, formed by an ancient meteor. On the other hand, there was the slope dropping off sharply from the adjacent road. The topography promised commanding views, provided that the building could navigate the treacherous elevation. “It was very important to find our position on the hill,” Van Severen said. “We wanted the house to feel like it belonged to the lake.”

The final design pushed the building down from the lip of the ridge, hiding it from its neighbors, and vice versa, to establish a remarkably intimate connection to the glassy Siljan about a mile and a half to the west. On the face of the gradient, the architects embedded the house’s primary structural element: 25 thick tubular piers, made from sturdy (and highly sustainable) cross-laminated timber, set at 11-foot increments in a rigid 45-foot-by-45-foot grid.

“The columns, in some sense, reflect the forest,” Geers said. “They’re pieces of nature.” With its glass exterior and wood-paneled trim above and below, 25 Columns is a kind of ultracontemporary treehouse, with a staircase to its rooftop terrace standing in for the conventional ladder.

The interior layout is accordingly spare — a central living space, flanked by three modest bedrooms plus an enclosed winter garden, all pressed to the perimeter and separated only by glazed partitions with custom curtains from Kvadrat — emphasizing communal living. Yet within the 2,000-square-foot space, Coirier and Simeone have created an eclectic shrine to their highly cultivated tastes.

Pieces in the same spirit as their Spazio Nobile exhibition, including a sculptural fireplace designed by Bela Silva and pendants by Philipp Weber, enliven the family room and make for a domestic environment as striking as the natural one visible at every turn through the floor-to-ceiling windows.

Insulated against the elements, those windows keep the house comfortable year-round, and the family is already preparing for a winter trip after their first stay over the summer.

“The architecture is strong, even radical,” Coirier acknowledged. Nonetheless, she said, the house feels very much like home. “We hug the columns.”

Turning Solo House inside out, 25 Columns represents a progression of the probing, abstract approach taken by the architects. On the precipitous incline beneath the Swedish house, they replaced the rocks that had been removed during construction, as if the little round courtyard in Spain had been stretched and carried halfway across a continent.