Lise Coirier was standing in the middle of a curious circular house, looking out at the rugged landscape of eastern Spain. The Belgium-based art historian, magazine publisher and (with her husbandjackpot city casino, Gian Giuseppe Simeone) gallery owner buttonholed her longtime friend Kersten Geers, who had designed the building with his business partner David Van Severen.
As Mr. Geers recalls it, “Lise said mysteriously: ‘If we ever do a holiday house, we want you guys to do it.’”
Over the next six years, the pals-turned-collaborators have found their way from that concrete-and-glass enclosure about two hours from Barcelona to a very different house in an altogether different place: central Sweden. There the duo from OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen has just wrapped up work on the couple’s new vacation home, an elegant, enigmatic box that the designers call 25 Columns. For all the distance between them, the two structures — one a bagel on a mesa, the other a forest-bound cube — remain deeply connected. “Somehow there’s this parallel,” Mr. Van Severen said.
The project that first fired Mr. Simeone’s and Ms. Coirier’s imaginations represented a major milestone for its architects, whose Brussels studio has been well regarded by design-world insiders since its founding in 2002. Eight years into their joint practice, Mr. Van Severen and Mr. Geers were awarded the Silver Lion for most promising young participants at the Venice Architecture Biennale. A series of prominent commissions followed, including a housing complex in Paris and a media center in Switzerland.
But the 2,000-square-foot house in the remote Spanish region of Matarraña presented the practice with an opportunity no public client (and few private ones) ever would. The project’s developers “basically gave us carte blanche,” Mr. Van Severen said, a chance for the architects to strut their avant-garde stuff.
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