Artificial grass blankets one wall of this renovated house in Switzerland by local studio Dubail Begert Architectes (+ slideshow).
Architects Sylvain Dubail and David Begert were tasked with improving the thermal efficiency of the two-storey 1970s house in Saignelégier, north-west Switzerland.
After adding extra insulation, they installed a new facade intended to reference the surrounding ground surfaces.
The rear wall is covered with artificial turf to match the garden lawn, while corrugated fibre-cement panels clad three walls and the roof as a nod to the grey tarmac of the road.
The architects compare the appearance to agricultural structures. "The house refuses the romantic and nostalgic ode to the bygone countryside and scoops out its inspirations contrariwise from the contemporary farm sheds," they said.
Interior spaces are kept simple, with clean white walls and floors, wooden furniture and ceilings, plus a few details picked out in green.
Other projects on Dezeen to feature artificial grass include a cook-for-yourself restaurant in Lithuania and the former home and studio of pop artist Roy Lichtenstein.
See more houses in Switzerland, including one with a corner missing from its roof and one lifted off a hillside on gigantic concrete columns.
Here's some more text from Dubail Begert Architectes:
Transformation residential house Saignelégier
Located in a residential area, this house built in 1974 is isolated outside to answer contemporary thermal requirements.
The facades plays on the theme of the mimicry with the materials of the floors of the outdoor spaces: place of access in bitumen and grassy garden. The three facades road side and the roof are coated with plates of fibre-cement corrugated anthracites (eternit), the facade garden side is coated with artificial turf.
The surface of outside spaces is extended so at the farthest and tends to remove the home in its stereotypic context of a neighbourhood of houses, delaying so in doubt the icon of sacrosanct single-family home.
In the middle of a quarter of villas of the years 70-80, composed in the majority of houses drawing inspiration from the traditional farm of the Swiss Jura mountains, the house refuses the romantic and nostalgic ode to the bygone countryside and scoops out its inspirations contrariwise from the contemporary farm sheds, to remind of the past close to a residential quarter and ask the question of the rurban sprawl and the maintenance of environmental heritage.
Indoors, reality plays wood between the white and according to the level of privacy of areas.
