OAD Wraps a Riverside Holiday Home near Riga in Thatch, Charred Timber and Saturated Interior Color

On a quiet riverbank in the suburbs of Riga, OAD (Open Architecture Design) has completed BPROM House, a 641 m² summer holiday home split into two buildings: a family residence and a guest house with a sauna. The studio frames the project as a tribute to Baltic ethnography, an attempt to fold ancient local building traditions into a contemporary family retreat. From the air the reference is easy to read. Two dark, timber-clad volumes sit under heavy thatched roofs, ringed by trees and turned toward the water.

What makes the house worth your attention is the gap between its outside and its inside. The exterior is restrained, almost severe: a palette of blackened boards, straw and gravel. Inside, the colors run high. Deep blue ceilings, lilac storage, magenta upholstery and iridescent glass appear throughout. We think that contrast is the real argument of the project. OAD keeps the vernacular as a protective shell and treats the interior as a place to be playful, without letting either side cancel the other out.

Two Houses Under One Vernacular

The aerial views show how deliberately the two buildings are composed. The main house bends in plan, with a long, low thatched roof running over a glazed timber wing. A dark tower punctuates the junction, and a stepping-stone path crosses the lawn as the only hard line in the grass. The roofs come down low and read as one continuous material, which makes a substantial floor area feel closer to a cluster of farm buildings than to a suburban villa.

Thatch is the riskiest choice here, and also the one that carries the most weight. A roof like this is tied to a specific regional craft. It also changes the silhouette: the eaves are soft, there is no visible gutter line, and the gables are pushed into sharp points. Against a grey Baltic sky the house looks settled and plausible rather than nostalgic, mostly because the glazing is cut in large, frank panels instead of imitation cottage windows.

Round Windows in Pointed Gables

The recurring motif is a circular window set high in a triangular gable. It is a small geometric move with a strong effect. The round opening gives the dark gable a face, softens the hard angles of the roof, and from inside frames sky and treetops instead of ground. In the home office, the circle sits next to a full-height window, and the two openings do different jobs: one for the view, one for light and orientation.

Look closely at the cladding around these windows and you'll see boards stained blue rather than pure black. It is a quiet early hint of the color that takes over inside. The covered terrace, with its rocking chair and dark timber ceiling, frames that circular window like a picture, which tells you the architects designed the gable as something to look at from the house itself.

Meadow, Gravel Garden and Plunge Pool

The landscape works on two registers. Around the buildings, loose meadow planting of grasses and purple flowers climbs right up to the charred walls, so the house appears to grow out of the field. Closer to the sauna pavilion, the mood shifts to something tighter: raked gravel, placed boulders, clipped pines and a small plunge pool. The Japanese influence is obvious, and it fits the sauna program well.

The covered terrace with its weathered steel fireplace sits between these two worlds. It is the most usable outdoor room on the site, sheltered on a cold summer evening and still open to the grasses. For a holiday home in a climate where summer is short and often grey, an outdoor room like this probably matters more than the pool.

A Blue House Inside a Black One

The double-height living space is where the interior palette shows itself fully. A deep blue sloped ceiling follows the roof pitch, blue kitchen cabinetry runs along the wall, and a weathered timber column stands in the middle like a relic of an older barn. Above the dining table, a blue perforated metal stair cuts through the volume, matched by blue table legs below. The color is not decoration added afterward. It is a structural decision that ties stair, joinery and ceiling into one system.

Elsewhere the blue gets darker and more textural. A curved stair with floating timber treads runs beside a charred wall finished in dark blue, carrying the exterior material inside and recoloring it. The lilac pantry, with its baskets and hanging glassware, shows the same attitude at a domestic scale: utility spaces get as much color attention as the main rooms.

Glass, Curtains and Color as Partition

OAD rarely uses a plain wall to separate rooms. Instead, reeded glass sliding panels in green, amber and clear, sheer pink curtains and a floor-to-ceiling striped textile do the dividing. Light passes through tinted and distorted, which produces the red and pink patches on the oak floors in several photographs. In the living room, a green reeded partition slides away to open the bedroom, so privacy becomes adjustable instead of fixed.

This is a sensible strategy for a summer house. Rooms can open up when the family is together and close down when guests arrive, and the soft materials keep the plan from feeling either cellular or fully open. The risk is visual overload. The interiors stay coherent mainly because the base materials, oak floors and timber, remain constant underneath the color.

The Guest House and Sauna Interiors

The wellness spaces take the charred timber language in a warmer direction. A round tub is clad in reddish charred slats against a speckled stone wall, and an arch of blackened boards frames a curved alcove with a bench lit from below. A stone-clad kitchenette sits next to another timber arch. Curves appear here far more than in the main house, which suits rooms meant for lingering rather than circulation.

The bathroom, with its fluted glass, iridescent panel and teal-stained timber, is the moodiest room in the set, deliberately dim and reflective. The purple lounge chair against a timber shelving grid offers a calmer counterpoint. Across these spaces, the sauna tradition is treated as something to reinterpret freely, not to reconstruct.

Plans and Drawings

The floor plan explains the bent silhouette visible from above: two angled wings meet at a hinge, with living spaces, garage and bedrooms arranged along them and a round stair tower marking the joint. The section confirms the logic of the gable, with the circular window set in the upper triangle, the spiral stair rising through the house and a basement void below grade that the exterior gives no sign of.

Why This Project Matters

Regional references in contemporary houses often fall into one of two traps: literal pastiche or a vague gesture toward pitched roofs. BPROM House avoids both by being specific about what it borrows. Thatch, dark timber and the steep gable carry the Baltic reference outside, while everything else, including the large glazing, the steel and glass interiors and the saturated color, is clearly of its time. You can read both layers at once, and neither apologizes for the other.

For anyone designing holiday houses in northern climates, the project also makes a practical case. A dark, low, heavily roofed shell suits short grey summers and wooded riverbanks. The color and translucency inside then compensate for limited daylight. We'd argue that pairing of sober envelope and expressive interior is the most transferable lesson here, and a more interesting one than the thatch alone.

BPROM House by OAD (Open Architecture Design), lead architect Zane Tetere-Sulce, with design team Jelena Ozolina-Jelisejeva and Maria Gembitskaya and technical team Valters Pozarnovs and Alvis Petrovskis. General contractor: Promark Construction. Location: Riga suburbs, Latvia. Area: 641 m². Year: 2025. Photography by Alvis Rozenbergs.

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