Mimosa Architects Unearths a Lost Krkonoše Cottage from Beneath Decades of Neglect

Somewhere beneath layers of socialist-era panel cladding, makeshift extensions, and decades of poor repairs, a traditional Krkonoše log cottage existed on a hillside above the village of Strážné. By the time Mimosa architects arrived, almost nothing of the original structure was worth preserving in material terms. What survived, critically, was the exposed beam ceiling, and with it a set of proportions that carried the spatial memory of the house. The architects made a decisive choice: rather than forcing contemporary principles into a traditional volume, they would build a new cottage rooted in the spatial logic of the old one.

The result, completed in 2025, is a 306-square-meter house that reads as an authentic mountain dwelling without resorting to historicizing detail. The tripartite layout of the original cottage organizes the plan. Steep roofs, stone plinths, boarded gables, and hayloft dormers are all drawn from the regional vocabulary of the Krkonoše Mountains, where buildings evolved over centuries to survive long winters and heavy snowfall. But every element is executed with contemporary precision: frameless glazing replaces small windows, a ground-source heat pump replaces old heating systems, and spring water is treated on site. The project is a thoughtful argument that rediscovering the spirit of a place does not require preserving its material substance.

A Dark Silhouette Against the Mountain

From a distance, the cottage reads as a single dark form nestled into its triangular sliver of mountainside, framed by mature trees and sloping meadows. The standing-seam metal roof and vertical timber cladding give it a monolithic quality that absorbs it into the forest edge rather than announcing its presence. The dual-gable composition, visible from the side, reveals the strategy: the original cottage volume is paired with an extension that tucks into the slope between the historic footprint and the hillside.

The stone retaining wall at grade grounds the timber volume in the landscape and recalls the traditional stone plinths of the region, which served the practical purpose of separating wood from earth. Here, the fieldstone paving and carefully graded drainage channels make the threshold between architecture and terrain feel like a continuous surface rather than a hard boundary.

Facades That Speak Two Languages

The facades shift register depending on which face you encounter. The principal gable elevations feature vertical timber slat screens with circular and arched window openings, elements borrowed from the hayloft dormers and boarded gables of the Krkonoše tradition. These openings are generous enough to flood the interior with light while maintaining the reading of a closed, sheltering volume. The arched upper window on the darker facade gives the cottage an almost chapel-like presence at dusk.

The lower portions of the building switch to horizontal timber cladding above the stone plinth, with ribbon windows that hover just above grade. At twilight, the central glazed gable glows like a lantern, revealing the pitched ceiling geometry within. The asymmetrical roof creates a sheltered porch on one side, a classic Krkonoše move that provides covered outdoor space during the region's frequent rain and snow.

The Main Living Room as Hearth

The ground floor centers on a main living room that operates as the gravitational core of the house. The surviving beam ceiling determined the proportions here, and you can feel it: the room is intimate without being cramped, protective without being dark. Built-in seating beneath the five-panel window wall creates a perch from which to watch mist roll through the forest. The large dining table, flanked by built-in benches and pendant lights, anchors the social life of the house.

The kitchen island, with its dark steel cabinetry beneath the exposed beams, is one of the project's sharpest details. Recessed shelf lighting illuminates the storage wall without competing with the natural grain of the timber ceiling. The material palette across this floor is disciplined: oak flooring, timber-paneled walls, metal joinery, and not much else. The architects trust the proportions and the views to do the work.

Circulation as Architecture

The entry hall and stairwell deserve their own reading. The entry sequence moves through a white plank ceiling and timber-paneled walls toward a glazed door that frames a slice of greenery, compressing space before releasing it into the main living areas. The staircase, inserted within the volume of the original house, uses a black steel handrail against warm timber to create a vertical spine that connects the grounded atmosphere of the ground floor to the more open loft above.

Pendant bulbs in the stairwell glow at dusk through the surrounding timber, turning the circulation core into a warm vertical lantern. The slatted timber flooring in the corridor leading to the sauna and wellness facilities suggests a transition from domestic space to something more elemental.

The Loft and Sleeping Spaces

The attic level follows the character of a traditional Krkonoše loft: generously open under the exposed timber trusses, with the pitched roof geometry creating naturally differentiated zones. Floor-to-ceiling glazing on one end opens the loft to the hillside meadow, pulling the landscape into the room in a way that the original cottage never could have managed. The bedroom tucks under the slope of the roof with a glazed wall overlooking trees, a sleeping space where the boundary between interior shelter and exterior wildness is held in tension.

Privacy for individual family members is achieved through the plan rather than through heavy partitions. The architects describe the attic as generously open while still providing separation, a balance that relies on the natural geometry of the pitched roof to create alcoves and thresholds without corridors.

Wellness and Service Spaces

The bathrooms and sauna facilities are housed in the reworked socialist-era service rooms, a practical decision that reuses the most compromised portion of the existing structure for utilitarian purposes. The freestanding bathtub beneath white subway tile and timber ceiling beams is the most overtly luxurious gesture in the house, but it reads as restrained rather than indulgent. Charcoal tile in the shower and timber cabinetry in the smaller bathrooms maintain the material consistency of the whole project.

The secondary service zone, wedged between the hillside and the historic volume, contains a pantry, laundry room, plant room, workshop, and storage for skis and bicycles. There is even a combined washroom for bicycles and dogs. This is mountain living treated honestly: a house that accommodates the full reality of active life in the Krkonoše rather than presenting a sanitized version of it.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan reveals the triangular sloped lot and the relationship between the two rectangular volumes. The ground floor plan shows the tripartite organization clearly: the main living space occupies the center, with bedrooms and bathrooms to the right and the service extension tucked against the slope. The upper floor plan demonstrates how the central staircase distributes access to the sleeping and living areas, with projecting balconies that extend the interior toward the landscape.

The section drawing reveals the steep pitched roof profile that defines the Krkonoše building tradition, while the elevation drawings show the careful calibration of cladding types, window rhythms, and the transition from stone plinth to timber volume to metal roof. The standing figure in the front elevation drawing gives a sense of scale: this is not a grand house, but a compact one whose spatial generosity comes from proportion rather than size.

Why This Project Matters

The Strážné Cottage poses a question that haunts every renovation project: when the material substance of a building is gone, what exactly are you preserving? Mimosa architects answer it with unusual clarity. They preserved proportions, spatial principles, and a relationship to climate and terrain. The beam ceiling that survived the decades of neglect became a dimensional template for everything that followed. The tripartite layout, the steep sheltering roofs, the stone plinth separating wood from earth: these are ideas, not artifacts, and they proved more durable than the timbers that first expressed them.

What makes the project convincing is its refusal to sentimentalize. There are no false-aged surfaces, no decorative references to a romanticized past. The house is powered by a ground-source heat pump, fed by spring water, and served by an on-site wastewater treatment plant. Its frameless glazing and dark steel kitchen would be at home in any contemporary house. But the spatial experience, the way you move from a compressed entry to the sheltering living room to the open loft, feels like it belongs to this specific hillside and this specific building tradition. That is a much harder thing to achieve than either a faithful restoration or a clean-sheet design, and it is the reason the project deserves serious attention.

Strážné Cottage by Mimosa architects (Jana Zoubková, Petr Moráček, Pavel Matyska, Eliška Vinklárková). Strážné, Czechia. 306 m². Completed 2025. Photography by Petr Polak.

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