River House: A Five-Bedroom Residential Home with A Sense of Timelessness

Completed in 2019 by Alexis Dornier, River House offers a comfortable house with a sense of timelessness and firmness. It is a five-bedroom residential home located in Pererenan, Bali with 1440.3 m² in size. Surrounded by the beautiful landscape of Bali, this house is a perfect place to enjoy nature.

Design

The private spaces inside this house are grouped into a cubistic volume. This volume hovers above the garden and the living rooms seemingly. There is also an expansive pool that can create a strong vector into the adjacent rice field.

Structure

One of the architect’s key credos is the continuation of Bali’s beautiful landscape into the spaces inside the house. It is one of the key credos in the architectural design for this project. For a three-dimensional experience, the existing topography is also embedded and used as the over-arching feature.

Locally sourced sandstone and reclaimed timber are used to create textures and surfaces in evoking a sense of timelessness and firmness, including a reference back to Bali’s vernacular building culture. The building is also surrounded by a palm tree forest, banana- and bodhi trees.

A wooden lattice is used to render the front and side elevations of the house’s volume, changing the arrangement’s scale into a more abstract object.

Details

The bedrooms in this house are furnished carefully. Each of those spaces is designed with natural stone finishes for recreation and retreat. The bedrooms’ views above ground capture beautiful sunsets above coconut trees.

The circulation inside leads through semi-outdoor spaces while the vast roof garden crowns the house’s volume which can be accessed through the central atrium. This atrium is covered by a large skylight.

River House Gallery

Photography: Alexis Dornier