Why Did This Architect Spend 8 Years Building Without Concrete? BC Architects

Woodstock, Belgian Ardennes

Everything in this house comes from within thirty kilometres. And because it floats above the landscape, it became an observatory for animals that you can live inside.

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Stone from the quarry next door, timber from the local sawmill, clay from the ground it stands on. Seven years of work by BC architects & studies, in the Belgian Ardennes.

The house is conceived as a wooden ship, seventy metres long, floating above the valley on three towers of rough natural stone. The walls are more than fifty centimetres thick and the stone comes straight from the quarry, uncut. During construction the team noticed that birds and bats had already moved into the openings between the rocks. They decided the animals could stay, and left the holes open. A house not lived in only by people.

Inside, the character changes. The wooden ship holds the living spaces, all local timber and room-length floorboards that follow the view down the valley. The stone towers hold the intimate rooms, finished in rammed earth and clay plasters coloured by the iron in the local ground. Nothing in this house is painted. Every colour comes from the material itself.

There is no gutter. When it rains you hear the water fall from the roof, and it can keep dripping for two weeks after a storm. That is not a flaw. It is the sound of the forest, kept.

Around the house the site was rewilded with seeds collected before the works began. The deer came back, and the boars, and the beavers.

"You can see the deer, you can see the boars, you can see beavers. It is really National Geographic in real."

Architecture by BC architects & studies
Filmed by Into the Wild Houses