It’s every architect’s fantasy—getting carte blanche from a client. “It was excellent, and the first time for me,” Gus Wustemann says with evident glee, recalling how a couple contacted him after seeing his work in magazines, and offered complete creative license. The couple owned a 2,000-square-foot attic apartment in the historic quarter of Lucerne, Switzerland, and wanted it not just renovated, but transformed.
“The place was a black box—practically no context whatsoever,” Wustemann says of the loft’s original condition. The architect, who has offices in Zurich and Barcelona, specializes in sleek, airy residential spaces. The dark garret in Lucerne was just calling for his brand of intervention.The clients, a food business manager and his wife, delivered a brief of only two points: a light-filled loft and better way to access their roof terrace (to replace the extremely ordinary existing stair). With these parameteres set, they let Wustemann get to work. No histrionics, no difficult contractors, no budget-related delays. Half a year and $190,000 later, the apartment was move-in ready.
Like this fairy-tale process, the resulting pure-white loft appears more ethereal than real. But that’s just the idea—the beauty distracts from the architect’s smart, hardworking solutions to the space’s shortcomings.Wustemann—a Swiss native and longtime mountaineer—took inspiration from the glacier as a metaphor for the stair to the terrace and the loft’s entire “landscape.” the motif would connect not only the apartment to its roof deck, but also this most Modern interior to the nearby alpine scenery. “Getting to the light, and to the terrace, is a little like getting to the summit,” he explains, envisioning the loft’s components as part of the ascent through a glacial landscape.
To set the tone for that narrative, Wustemann coated the floors in white polyurethane, creating a “frozen lake” beneath his glacier. Offsetting the coolness of the floors, warm, honey-brown, unvarnished oriented strand board (OSB) forms the bathroom and service cores. For the built-in furniture and cabinetry, the architect chose the same inexpensive material, which offers a desirable sustainability through its reconstituted content. Elsewhere in the loft, OSB reappears in two other finishes—slick, lacquered white for the glacier stair, kitchen, and bedroom; and whitewashed for the existing structural walls—calling to mind the transformative states of such natural substances as stone eroding into sand or water chilling into ice.Most of the loft, apart from the cores, remains open. Though the place, roughly trapezoidal in plan, appears free-form, the glacier stair is its centerpiece, immediately visible on entry. Here, Wustemann created a lacquered sculptural wall that rises with a meandering path of asymmetrically placed steps. Niches articulate the glacial cascade, casting an animated play of shadows while offering nooks for object display or storage. Also on the stair, friends can gather and chat or watch dinner preparation.
Much like ice floes on a frozen lake, the kitchen and bathroom are seemingly stationary objects that actually move. The bathroom, at first glance a simple OSB box, can be closed for privacy or partially opened, keeping the room’s lower registers discretely hidden. The kitchen’s almost seamless white surfaces can be unfastened, its hinged panels revealing a refrigerator, stove, oven, and sink. And sheer white curtains—one covering a blank wall as if concealing yet another section of the apartment, the other closing off the bedroom—sway in the breeze. The movement keeps the loft’s sculptural sections in dialogue, even as the conventions of function remain purposefully obscured. “For many people, it would be a new kind of living,” says Wustemann, “because there are so few recognizable architecture features—the bathroom, the kitchen, the usual boring stuff.”
Enhancing the loft’s enigmatic qualities is the near absence of direct illumination. Slits in the lacquered walls glow with hidden, dimmable fluorescents. More recessed fluorescents lie in the stair nooks, beneath the kitchen cabinets, and under a living-area seating platform, providing light that filters through the space much as rays pass through a hunk of icy crystals, appearing bright white in some spots, but dark, almost blue, in others. As Wustemann notes, “The sculptures become alive through the light, taking the pressure off the call for a big window.” Without adding to the existing 10 small windows and single skylight, he achieved this remarkable luminosity.
After a leisurely glide through the loft, the path up the glacier wall offers yet one more delightful delay to the summit. There, the terrace awaits with a panorama of old Lucerne and the Swiss Alps beyond—a stunning view, well worth the journey.