Modern Home’s Transparent Ground Floor Radiates at Night

In the seaside town of Mlle, Sweden stands a modern home whose contrasting upper and lower storeys complement one another with their opposite-feeling designs. Architecture studio Elding Oscarson constructed the three-level, 300 square-meter building and clad over half of it in roughly-sawn Douglas Fir planks and kept the bottom section completely transparent. This creates an elegant visual balance without feeling too top-heavy, and at night the light of the ground floor has a radiating effect.

Floor-to-ceiling windows wrap around the building, and their slender frames offer residents uninterrupted views of the surrounding landscape and coastline in the distance. To ensure that they remain unobstructed, the living, dining, and kitchen spaces are all free standing. This includes a kitchen island and a wood-burning stove in the middle of the room. White spiral stairs lead to bedrooms upstairs and a basement, which accommodates a sauna into its design.

The house is located in an area whose reputation is “Sinful Mlle,” a provocative place that during the start of the 20th century allowed men and women to enjoy each other's company at the same beach. This attitude yielded an experimentation in building that eventually faded with time. Elding Oscarson was inspired by this history and incorporated it into their design. “Our ambition has been to recover Mlle's dormant architectural tradition, extrapolating it into the twenty-first century, while providing a house for generations to come.”

Elding Oscarson website
via [Dezeen]

Sara Barnes

Sara Barnes is a Staff Editor at My Modern Met, Manager of My Modern Met Store, and co-host of the My Modern Met Top Artist Podcast. As an illustrator and writer living in Seattle, she chronicles illustration, embroidery, and beyond through her blog Brown Paper Bag and Instagram @brwnpaperbag. She wrote a book about embroidery artist Sarah K. Benning titled 'Embroidered Life' that was published by Chronicle Books in 2019. Sara is a graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art. She earned her BFA in Illustration in 2008 and MFA in Illustration Practice in 2013.
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