Residential home, Büttenhardt

The new house replaced a structure at one end of the farmhouse, a small century-old holiday home that had long been vacant and derelict. The new structure was designed by two young Zurich-based architects, Benjamin Widmer and Roland Bernath (Bernath, who was a carpenter before studying architecture, learned his craft nearby.) They inspected the wood that had been traditionally felled during a full moon. Tree trunks were lined up, thick and thin, long and short, along both sides of the path in front of the farmyard, 500 cubic metres in all. Based on the list of available wood, the architects planned the building in collaboration with a log house specialist. The maximum drilled length provided the axial dimensions (5.2 metres). The different kinds of wood were distributed according to their properties and are now clearly visible in the completed structure. The external frame of the timber frame construction consists of weather-resistant oak beams (20 × 20 centimetres); the infill of 8- to 14-centimetre-thick pine planks. The wood was cut on site by mobile bandsaws. The heartwood was drilled out in a neighbouring town and the beams left to dry for about a year. Finally, carpenters erected the joined elements on the concrete basement.

The traditional half-timber construction, filled in with planks, can do without cavity ventilation and without the elaborately detailed joints at the windows and doors that log house construction usually involves. As the columns in the walls bear the weight rather than the walls themselves, subsidence is also much reduced. The interior is mainly of beech, which made up the lion's share of the felled wood, but which must not be exposed to the elements. And of course the floorboards, stairs, banisters and window jambs are also made of the owner's wood – altogether about 90% of the house – which means that it is free of glue and thus a healthy, renewable material, locally sourced and processed, and therefore environmentally sound.

This pilot project, which uses heartwood-free hardwood for the first time in the construction a large building, is remarkable not only in structural terms. Being at one end of the old farmhouse, it looks out into the large clearing in a stately, symmetrical, and somehow classical manner. The low-hipped roof with its wide overhang protects the wooden facade. The windows are as high as the rooms and each sits in the middle of a framed section; diagonal planks form the infill on the facade as well as the sliding shutters fitted into it. Sunlight filtering through the slits in the shutters casts a cheerful atmosphere over the bedrooms behind. Each of the rooms is one youth's private realm; three per storey share a laundry room plus bathroom and toilet. A big common room, part of it two storeys high, forms the centre of the first upper storey. In the connection with the old farmhouse are a communal kitchen and the group worker's room. Access to the rooms on the second upper storey is via a spacious gallery from which there is a view not only down into the main room but also out into the extensive clearing and the forest from which the house was made.

The two partition walls of the upper storeys form load-bearing frames, thanks to which the ground floor ceiling spans the room without supports. Because the members of these load-bearing frames exceed the maximum length of the beams, a tension rod in the hollow core of the wood joins two sections together – a possibility created by the special way the wood was prepared. The big dining room opens up on two glazed sides to a deep veranda. At weekends, it turns into a restaurant serving day trippers visiting a nearby recreational area; during the week the residents eat there. The veranda's wooden trelliswork creates a holiday atmosphere and reminds older locals of the previous building’s plant-covered pergola.

The stacks of firewood along the edge of the forest show what the precious beeches, oaks and maples were used for until now. Today the new Ferienheim Büttenhardt shows what else can be made from them: beautiful cosy houses, like habitable pieces of furniture that can be built by small local entrepreneurs independently of the logging industry.