Villa Wood / Digital possibilities in an archetypical wood house

Digital possibilities and traditional methods in archetypical wood house
Villa Wood stands out in the suburbs of Copenhagen as an example on how to live and build in a climate-friendly way. Built with mass-timber elements (CLT) and designed through digital programming, this modern archetypic house, makes design possible for a wide variety of families with different living patterns - and preferences.

Villa Wood is developed as ‘living laboratory’ of modern and sustainable building types that aims for a low climate footprint, but maximum impact on life quality as well as a healthy indoor climate. Housing makes up a large part of the building stock in Denmark, and we spend more than half of our days inside, so the influence of the home environments on people’s wellbeing, is obvious.

’With CLT elements in mass-timber, we can create and customize houses in countless variations and thus meet a lot of different ways of living, with a healthy indoor environment as a common denominator for all. We experience that living in this environment has a valued effect on our everyday lives. Besides from the nice atmosphere that surrounds us, we also experience less allergies’ says Morten Rask Gregersen, partner and architect at NORD Architects and living in Villa Wood.

Variations and customization to match a diverse range of life patterns
The wood elements can be cut and configured in many constellations with numerous variations of size, space, function and connections between rooms. The house is based on 3D detailing and digital production methods that makes way for several types of detached single-family dwellings and can also be scaled for larger housings. The method provides efficient design management, which is beneficial in the larger developments. For smaller housing it invites for individual co-creation and cooperations, where architect and client can develop and customize typologies in a close dialogue that is focused on the needs and dreams of the individual client.

The diversity of people, life patterns, places and sites call for experiments and customization to meet modern and sustainable ways of living and to create healthy built environments where people thrive and appreciate living for a long period of time. Villa Wood is designed for disassembly, so all parts are potentially destined for reuse. Flexibility, variations on principles, co-creation, optimization are all elements of this living and creative laboratories we aimed for.

‘It’s interesting how you can incorporate and transfer the recognizable and unique in a building with archetypical characteristics through digital design and production methods. It seems like there is no loss in quality from sketch to production or from origin to outcome. The basic idea is very visible. It is the elements in wood which make this characteristic silhouette so precise and distinct ‘, Morten Rask Gregersen continues.

Advantages in construction and scalable design
In this house, the elements are treated with lye on the inside to create bright and natural interiors, in contrast to the charred pine that the house is clad with on the exterior. The charring method is a traditional Japanese form of protection that replaces the use of toxic impregnation – shou sugi ban. The same was used by the Vikings to protect their wood constructions. The exterior cladding sharpens the profile and geometry of the volume as a detached house.

The solid wood elements can be assembled in a few days, which means lower construction costs on site and reduces the weather impact compared to an exposed and open construction.

The compact nature of the solid and stable wood element, the easy assembly, the low material waste and the light weight, makes the advantages for sustainable living evident. This family house in a suburban area, shows how the vision of sustainable and archetypical design, easily can develop from a sketch to the realization of a customized house with generous amounts of life quality and a responsible impact on climate.