In the protected village core of Hettlingen, a half-hour north of Zürich, Orso Dettling slips a contemporary timber house into a long-empty stable barn whose original roof and brick walls stay legible.
Hettlingen sits in the Zürcher Weinland, a thirty-minute train ride north of Zürich, where half-timbered farmhouses and tile roofs still describe the shape of the village center. One stable barn at its core had stood empty for decades, slowly slumping into the cobbles. Orso Dettling's studio inherited a brief few would envy: turn the imposing void into a house without flattening the agricultural memory the canton's monument office had been holding in trust.
The studio approached the work as a study before it became a building, drawn out alongside the cantonal monument preservation and the local Ortsbildschutz. What they delivered reads like a contemporary timber construction inscribed into a protected shell, with the existing brick and tile retained as the public face. The forecourt and former stable door are kept compact, as the historical fabric demands. Beyond that threshold, the section opens into something the village would never have shown from the street.
A corridor runs along a row of cloakroom and side-rooms and ends in the heart of the plan, a two-storey dining room beside the kitchen. In front of it sits a covered terrace where horses once stood, its brick parapet, exposed roof joists and copper downpipe left frankly visible. Beyond the terrace stretches an elongated garden. The interior is lined almost entirely in pale knotty spruce CLT, ceilings included, against which a long fumed-oak kitchen island with green-veined granite worktops registers as the only dark mass in the room.
An open spruce stair tucked beside the kitchen lifts you onto the living gallery. From there the view runs back over the cooking and dining areas and into the garden, the whole height of the former barn legible at once. Above, a vertical opening the studio calls the Lichtkanone, a light cannon, cuts through every upper floor and into the roof. Skylights set between the original rafters drop daylight all the way to the ground, so the gable volume is registered not as form but as light.
Higher still, a hanging oak stair pulled away from the wall threads up through the gallery ceiling toward the bedrooms and the main bath, the latter tiled in a small green mosaic that picks up the granite below. From the landing one looks down through the light cannon into the dining room and up to the topmost floor, a single open chamber Dettling calls the crown of the house, configurable, unprogrammed, framed only by the original timbers.
The constructive logic stays close to the agricultural source. Spruce panels, oak treads, brick walls and clay tile do most of the talking; the new work is pulled inside the protected envelope and signs itself only where it has to. The house keeps the village outline intact and, as the studio puts it, leaves the history of the place ready to keep being written.
