Villa Bjorland
Villa Bjorland is a careful restoration and addition to a 1955 house in Stavanger. Its main motif is a semicircular entrance volume that reads as a small public room, a deliberate disjunction from the idea of domesticity.
The extension is built of red brick and attaches to the southern flank of the house. The original rectilinear volume is reclad in horizontal black timber with a shift in dimension at the floor level, underlining its postwar character while allowing the addition to take on its own presence. The cylinder marks the new entrance and contains the primary stair and it projects slightly beyond the main gable facade.
The house stands in a neighborhood largely developed in the 1960s, where black timber and red brick are common and the project plays on that. Also, the project draws from the farm buildings of Norway’s west coast, where small circular silos are joined to barns, sometimes within the volume of the barn and sometimes standing free of it. Villa Bjorland reinterprets this typology: the way the circle attaches to the main body, the manner in which a pitched roof unifies differing geometries, and the altered associations that arise when the silo is halved and opened toward the street. Internally, the plan of the existing house remains for the most part unchanged. The kitchen and principal living rooms stay in their original positions.
