Halde is a small practice of eleven architects and one landscape gardener. We build houses, pavilions and quiet public rooms in timber and concrete, always on land we have walked in the rain first.
A-01 — Intent
Notes from the studio wall. Pinned since 2014, amended in pencil most winters.
We start with a survey of what is already there: the slope, the rock, the way water leaves the site, and every tree worth keeping. The house comes last, and it is usually smaller than the client first imagined, and better for it.
Two seasons of visits before a plan. We draw sun paths, snow load and wind by hand, and set the footprint where the ground asks least of it.
Larch, board-formed concrete, weathering steel, glass. Chosen to age in public, and to be repaired by a local carpenter rather than replaced.
A deep roof is the cheapest room there is. Most of our houses have one, and most of our clients end up living under it.
A-02 — Selected work
Each project is shown the way we pin it up in the studio: one render, one plan, one elevation, the materials and a few notes.
P.01
A house that is mostly roof. The veranda runs the full length of the south face, and is where the family actually lives from May to September.
The glulam frame is set on a 3.6 m grid. Sliding glass panels between each bay let the interior open completely, and the 2.4 m overhang keeps summer sun off the floor while letting winter light reach the back wall.
P.02
The house is cut into the hillside; the pool is what's left when you take the terrace out.
A single retaining wall of board-formed concrete holds back the slope and becomes the back wall of every room. The pool runs parallel to it, 28 metres long and 40 centimetres from the glass, so the living room ceiling is lit by the water all afternoon.
P.03
One roof, 42 metres long, floating over a limestone wall and a lawn that runs straight through the house.
The roof is a steel plate structure only 220 mm deep at the edge. Beneath it, the rooms are arranged as a row of stone boxes with open glass between them, so the meadow is visible from every point in the plan.
P.04
The smallest footprint we have ever built: one room per floor, stacked between the trunks.
We cut down no trees. The cross-laminated timber shell went up in nine days from a single crane position on the forest track, and the larch cladding is left untreated to go silver like the bark around it.
A-03 — Process
Contours, rock, water and trees. The existing site, drawn to scale before anything else.
The footprint goes where the ground is already flat. Walls follow the contour.
Doors and glass placed by view and by sun, one room at a time.
Tables, beds and stoves drawn in early, so the rooms are sized for what happens in them.
Colour for materials, then the numbers. By now it is a drawing someone can build from.
A-04 — Materials
Samples from the studio shelf. Everything here is expected to change colour within five years, and is chosen for the colour it changes to.
M.01Siberian larch
Untreated, 22 × 68 mm, open-jointed. Honey for a year, then silver.
M.02Board-formed
Cast against rough-sawn spruce so the grain of the shuttering stays in the wall.
M.03Corten, 3 mm
Fascias, gutters and chimneys. Rusts to a stable skin and stops.
M.04Glulam, spruce
Structure left visible inside. Nothing boxed in that can't be repaired.
Every project begins the same way: standing on the site in bad weather, with a pencil.
— Ingrid Halde, founder
A-06 — Studio
Studio at Nygårdsgaten 14, Bergen. A second desk in Lisbon, Rua da Bica 22.
We still draw by hand for the first three months of every project. Computers arrive when the pencil has nothing left to decide.
We take on four to six projects a year, so each client works with the same two architects from the first site visit to the last snag list. Our landscape gardener joins every project at the survey, not at the end.
We work in Norway, Sweden and Portugal, and occasionally further when a site is worth the flight.