The Architect´s Blackbrown Dream

In Askim, south of Gothenburg, on a slope facing southwest, very close to the sea, stands Villa Timmerman. It’s a two-family house designed by architect couple, Andreas Lyckefors and Josefine Wikholm.

The house is completely built of wood, and a point of reference has been Carl Wilhelmson’s national romantic studio on Skaftö from 1913. The ambition was a robust and relaxed house to live in. The dark wooden facade has been treated with black-brown pine tar paint, which includes both black and brown pigment.

The origin of the color was a desire for a warmer black hue, rich in pigment and open to be experienced differently in different lights. Andreas Lyckefors experimented at home in the storage room with sample jars and wooden sticks to get the exact shade of black-brown. This later became the new product Black-brown tar paint, in large-scale production at Auson.

Villa Timmerman has a straight-folded, tongue-and-groove panel. On top of it is a layer of grid boards with a pattern image of diagonal and vertical ribs. The grid was an experiment that proved to work well as protection against solar radiation on the facade and as a protective layer against the sometimes hard rain of the Swedish west coast.

The roof is a combination of a tarred wood panel and solar cells. Here, the solar panels have been seamlessly integrated into the wooden roof – a technique that looks simple but requires careful detailing.