Every architect (well, almost) wants his design to be part, as much as possible, or feasible, with the environment, particularly if the edifice to be designed and built lies in the middle of a natural habitat, outside rural and industrial areas. Dominic Stevens has done just that: He incorporates the building so much into the environment, that you blink and miss it. This is the Mimetic House.
Dominic Stevens is not your usual architect. He does no more than one or two projects per year, he is a farmer (breeding goats, chicken and geese and produces cheese) and also does not think twice about doing carpentry work on-site during building phase of his projects. It goes without saying then that his buildings will not be your run-of-the-mill modern towers of self promotion. The Mimetic House is build in the village of Dromahair in County Leitrim in Ireland. the owners, Grace Weir and Jo Walzer are both conceptual artists-no surprise! The site is a lush green plateau (after all, this is Ireland), with a small valley that the house is placed on top of.
The cladding material is sheets of glass, alternating with reflective panels. Along with the grass roof, it manages to imitate the surrounding countryside: in broad daylight it is hardly discernible from the nearby bushes and blades of grass. Only during the night, it becomes most visible, when the lights come on.
The entrance is not very visible either. Dominic Stevens has cut into the slope below to make it out of the hillside. All bedrooms, bathroom and cloakroom are dug out of the earth-so you have to enter through the ground, to rise above into nature and light, into the white interiors of the living room-with an inclination outwards, it is a space outside our classic living room notion. The inclination of the walls means that the ground, not the sky, is reflected. The use of recycled materials is ubiquitous: the retaining wall is made of car tyres.
The house is thus made part of the landscape, reflecting it and changing with it, season after season. It won an AAI (Architectural Association of Ireland) award this year for architectural excellence. It was designed and built as part of research undertaken under the auspices of the Arts Council / Office of Public Works Kevin Kieran Award 2005-07. It is also consistent with Stevens’ own thesis to make architecture affordable to all – a house built for the same cost as a typical one-off Irish bungalow.
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