Lake Lugano House, Brusino Arsizio, Switzerland

The Lake Lugano House project was born out of the idea to explore the new possibilities enabled by SketchUp 15 and VRay 2.0. It is a personal interpretative study of a house on the shore of Lake Lugano, Switzerland. The project aims to study dusk scenes with artificial interior and exterior lightning. The project took close to two weeks.

The project also attempted to achieve a photo realistic look using the built-in depth of field feature in VRay. There was a focus on crisp and contrast-rich images achieved thanks to the cinematography color grading plug-in used during Photoshop post production. The project also includes an image with cloudy sky and gold interior; the tones seen here were mostly achieved using Photoshop.

Inspired by the previous work of James Pickford.

Lying on the slope of a hill, on the shores of Lake Lugano , the villa consists of two volumes organized on different levels due to the particular topography of the site. A polygonal shaped glass pavilion with rounded edges stands above a linear underground block. The living and dining room, the kitchen and storage spaces are located in the pavilion, while bedrooms, bathrooms and garage are in the lower level. Each level relates itself with independent outdoor spaces, which are closely related with the interiors. The glass pavilion overlooks two very defined areas: the first, toward the mountain, is a very private zone resulted in the area between the property line and the building setback line according to the local building code. The second is a garden overlooking the lake. In the same way, the bedrooms face a garden enclosed by the building and the perimeter wall. The ring, obtained between the perimeter wall above and the pavilion, amplifies the interior space, with seems much larger than what it actually is.