Prague-based studio Machar Teichman architects designed a house that behaves like two different buildings depending on which side you’re standing on — a closed screen facing the street, a fully open room facing the orchard behind it. House in the Orchard was built for a family returning to their home region after years abroad, on a plot in the village of Ondřejov left thick with mature fruit trees. The two faces aren’t a stylistic flourish: they’re the structure’s entire response to living somewhere both public and completely private at once.
Returning after years abroad, the young family who commissioned the house brought a brief shaped by two things pulling in different directions: a close attachment to the local landscape and an open-minded appetite for contemporary architecture, rather than a nostalgic replica of what was already there. Machar Teichman architects treated that tension as the project’s starting point rather than a problem to resolve away.
The garden made the case on its own. The plot sits within the village fabric of Ondřejov, spacious enough to hold a mature orchard of fruit trees that predates the house by decades, and gently sloped in a way the design works with rather than levels off. That same instinct — letting an old garden shape a new house rather than clearing it — runs through Facha architekti’s Box in the Barn, where a new dwelling in rural Bohemia was built to keep its own apple tree garden and threshing-floor axis intact.
Materials borrowed from the village carry the connection further. The exterior combines smooth white plaster with cedar wood cladding, chosen so the house’s shape, scale, and surface would echo the surrounding rural architecture rather than stand apart from it. Mimosa Architects’ Strážné Cottage, elsewhere in the Czech Republic, makes a related argument in a different register — recovering the proportion and craft of a Bohemian mountain dwelling without slipping into faux-historical kitsch.
Toward the street, the house closes, its mass and overall expression deliberately closer to a street-facing fence than a conventional façade — protecting the family’s privacy and marking a clear boundary between the private garden and the more public edge of the plot.
Toward the garden, it opens completely, particularly to the southeast, where the main living room and kitchen sit behind a wall of frameless glazing and a sliding window. The space is left open straight up into the roof structure and connects directly onto a terrace that continues into the garden, blurring interior and exterior while still leaving room for smaller, sheltered corners tucked into the planting.
A T-shaped plan splits the program into two distinctly separated wings, each under its own flat roof. The southern wing holds the bedrooms; the northern wing takes on the practical load of the house, with garden storage and a covered parking space. Between them, the open living room sits under a pitched titanium-zinc roof, visually and structurally distinct from the two flanking volumes.
An attic study caps the living room, tucked into the pitched roof as a quiet, self-contained space for working from home, away from the rest of the household. Wood-framed windows throughout the house carry the same material honesty as the cedar cladding outside, reinforcing the rural, unpretentious character the whole project is built around.
From the village street, none of this is visible — just a plastered and cedar-clad wall doing its job as a fence, giving nothing away about the glazed room and the orchard opening up on the other side of it.
House in the Orchard by Machar Teichman architects | Location: Ondřejov, Czech Republic — Year: 2025 — Key materials: white plaster, cedar wood cladding, titanium-zinc roofing, wood-framed windows