The architect’s black and brown dream

In Askim, south of Gothenburg, on a southwestern slope close to the sea, lies Villa Timmerman. The house is a two-family house designed by the architect couple Andreas Lyckefors and Josefine Wikholm.
The house is built entirely in wood and a reference has been Carl Wilhelmson’s national romantic studio on Skaftö from 1913. The ambition was a robust and relaxed house to live in. The dark wooden facade has been treated with Black-Brown tar paint, which includes both black and brown pigments.

The origin of the color was a desire for a warmer black color that was rich in pigment and could be perceived differently in different light. Andreas Lyckefors experimented at home in the apartment storeroom with sample jars and wooden sticks to get exactly the right shade of black-brown. This then became the new product Black Brown Tar Paint, in large-scale production at Auson.

Villa Timmerman has a straight-jointed, tongue-and-groove panel. On top of it is a layer of grid boards with a pattern of diagonal and vertical ribs. The grid was an experiment that proved to work well as a protection against solar radiation on the facade and as a protective layer against the driving rain of the west coast.
The roof is a combination of a tarred wooden panel and solar cells. Here, the solar panels have been seamlessly integrated into the wooden roof, a technique that looks simple but requires careful detailing.