Tea pavillion Schovenhorst | sounds like a paradise and it really is!

In 2000 Alle Hosper landscape architects developed a future scenario, which is expected to draw 50.000 visitors per year. The plan envisaged a spatial redevelopment and the addition of modern architecture.

As the result of an invited competition na-ma was commissioned to design a visitor center inside a former tree nursery. On one side of the nursery a former greenhouse wall connects two black wooden barns. The new tea pavilion adds one more fragment to this series finalizing the enclosure of the garden. The resulting enclosed garden is the only open space in the forest with sufficient distance to observe the surrounding trees in elevation. Inside the nursery small trees are experienced as objects rather than as elevations.

This experience of the trees and the garden is enhanced in the design of the visitor center. By positioning the tea pavilion at the site of a former parking lot movement trough the garden is stimulated. This movement and experience of the garden is continued inside the pavilion. A large sliding door offers an open angled view back into the garden. To enable this unobstructed view we re-used a traditional Dutch farmhouse structural principle; the ‘vierkant’. This structure consists of four massive wooden columns and beams carrying the main load of the roof. Upward a sculptural skylight frames the top of trees.

The exterior is made out of anthracite fiber cement slates. The fact that the building is part of the garden walls is expressed by cutting the black stained western red cedar walls into the fiber cement volume of the building. The dark color relates to the existing barns and highlights the surrounding green elements. Contrasting to the dark structure of the exterior, the interior wall and ceiling panels are made of American white oak.

Schovenhorst Estate, Putten,
Netherlands na-ma architecture,
Amsterdam 2006-07

Written for 91° magazine, www.cembrit.cz