House Hunkeler designed by SEILERLINHART is an extension and renovation of a parish house and school from 1722 in Sarnen, Switzerland.
In 1722, the Jesuit priest Dr. Johann Baptist Dillier built a school and residential building for the students of the seminar not far from Lake Sarnen. This historically important house was repeatedly rebuilt and extended during the 19th and 20th centuries.
The now realized conversion of the listed building (cultural object of local importance) clears the inner building structure of the house, reduces the less substantial, created in the 20th century cultivation and extends the house to the south with a new wooden room layer. This adds a generous kitchen and dining room, as well as a loggia upstairs and a bedroom with bathroom and laundry room on the ground floor the additional necessary space for a contemporary residential use. The conversion was made under the motto of “complementary restoration”. It was neither a trace blurring restitution, nor a pathetic old-new rhetoric and not a detail-loving fragmentation of spatial units. The goal was of course in the logic of the building “continue to build.” Despite the existing variety of shapes and surface textures, the interventions remain interlinked.
