Čardak is one of those increasingly popular and prestigious “Beverly Hills” locations on the slopes of Fruška Gora for family life. With good configuration, sunlight exposure of the slope, connectivity to the city, and unfortunately the suppressed awareness of the growing need for infrastructure renewal due to new construction. That will happen last.

Designing on a steep slope covered in bushes creates a unique sense of challenge, opportunity, and partly uncertainty, which is mitigated but not eliminated with the help of geodetic data, CAD drawings, and 3D models, until the very completion of the building.

It’s about uniting the plan and the vertical division of the building from which stems the quality resolution of communications, platforms, views, sunlight, and often neglected structure at the start. Basically, we said that there is a street to which we connect and the idea of a flattened yard-platform-square that you arrive at. I believe that the biggest quality of this building came from the concept and the right position of that yard. It attached itself like a worm-parasite, subtly to the ground, to extract the best from the configuration of the plot and its surroundings.

The topography also dictated the inversion of the traditional vertical ranking of spaces within the house. The attic is on the ground floor, the children are on the first floor, and the living room with the parental section, yard, and pool is on the second floor. 

The building has a separate external entrance on each floor, and we wanted, for this reason, and because of the previously mentioned inversion of space division, to clearly emphasize the main entrance to the house. This gave us a rare opportunity to create a floating porch and entrance moment with an unusual view. Usually, a guest looks at the house as he approach, here the opportunity opened for a small visual spectacle towards Popovica Hill. That same hill across the street becomes a picture frame and a view towards the street from the quieter parental and children’s rooms with terraces, where we try to pull the user into that precious gray zone of outside-inside. The same principle was applied to the living room with views towards the city and the forest above the yard, which was easy to achieve when the view from the platform level and living room was positioned correctly.