THE BRASS FOREST – House, Predeal

The brief was a 505sqm plot in Predeal and a client’s dream of a retreat in nature. A mountain house, where family feels closer and memories are built. Behind the boundary fence, in the back yard, someone else’s spruce trees.

Those trees became the project.

Not as a picturesque backdrop, but as a generative force – the organizing idea from which every decision followed. The house was designed to be in constant dialogue with its surroundings: openings calibrated toward views on all four sides, volumes arranged so that the landscape is never entirely absent from any room. The spruces to the rear are not borrowed scenery. They are, in effect, part of the architecture.

The lot was small and the constraints were real. Rather than treating this as a limitation, the section became an opportunity. With more than 1m of level difference between the two street-facing corners of the plot, a semi-buried lower level accommodates a bedroom with an English courtyard – light arriving from below grade, intimate and unexpected – alongside the garage and technical spaces. The ground floor, elevated 1m above the natural terrain at the entrance point, accommodates the family room and kitchen. Above, three bedrooms are organized around the double-height living volume that opens the house vertically, compressing and releasing space in sequence. The result is a house that feels larger than its footprint – not through excess, but through the intelligence of its section.

One element defines the main facade: a conservatory attached to one of the upper bedrooms, conceived as a space for stillness and observation. Its A-frame glass structure faces the Caraiman massif and the open sky. West-oriented, it captures afternoon light and accumulates solar warmth through winter, transmitting it gently into the interior. It is simultaneously a passive thermal strategy and a room that does nothing but exist at the intersection of mountain, sky, and silence.

The exterior language is rooted in a single commitment: wood, in every form it will take. Timber facade cladding, custom shutters, and wood-framed windows establish a material continuity between the house and the forest that surrounds it. The architecture does not contrast with its setting – it extends from it.

Architecture & interior design: Piano:Terra
Photography: Sabin Prodan