Project Name: Borås Getaway House

Location: Borås, Sweden

Design Team: Claesson Koivisto Rune

Floor Area: 65 m²

Year of Completion: 2024

Photography: Åke E-son Lindman

Design Features: Nestled into a steep, forest-clad hillside on the shores of a glassy Swedish lake, the Borås Getaway House by Claesson Koivisto Rune is a masterclass in doing more with less. Completed in 2024, the 65-square-metre retreat distils the art of Scandinavian minimalism into four scattered cubic volumes that hover between the trees like crystalline formations emerging from ancient rock.

Conceived as a weekend sanctuary for a family of four, the project confronts two formidable constraints head-on: an almost inaccessible sloping site and a strictly limited building allowance. Rather than fighting the terrain, the Stockholm-based practice chose to work with it, anchoring the main house on a single central foundation that extends beneath the structure like a mushroom stalk, allowing the building to cantilever dramatically over the hillside with a minimal ground footprint.

The material palette is deliberately spare and uncompromising. Glass and galvanised steel form the exterior skin, the latter left untreated to oxidise naturally over time, acquiring a patina that will gradually harmonise with the surrounding moss and granite. The cubes are bisected at a precise equatorial line, fully glazed below and fully metallic above, a move that dissolves the boundary between interior and landscape while eliminating unwanted reflective glare across the lake. Inside the main house, the most arresting spatial idea reveals itself: a secondary timber cube, rotated 45 degrees within the outer shell, simultaneously houses the kitchen, bathroom and storage while carving out four distinct living zones from what is effectively a single open room. The warmth of wood against concrete and steel is both sensory counterpoint and structural ingenuity. Above it all, a sunken roof terrace hidden within the metal upper volume places residents quite literally among the treetops, offering a private, elevated world utterly removed from the everyday.

Design Team: Founded in Stockholm in 1995 by architects Mårten Claesson, Eero Koivisto and Ola Rune, Claesson Koivisto Rune has evolved from a Swedish architectural practice into one of the most consistently rigorous multi-disciplinary design offices operating internationally today. All three founding principals hold the designation of Architect SAR SIR/MSA, and each trained across multiple leading institutions spanning Stockholm, Helsinki, Copenhagen, New York and London, a trans-European academic grounding that is legible in the firm's precise yet culturally nuanced built work.

Over three decades, the practice has maintained an uncompromising dual focus on architecture and product design, with commissions spanning civic buildings, hospitality, residential, exhibition, and an extensive industrial design portfolio encompassing furniture, lighting, textiles and sanitary ware for more than 80 international manufacturers. The firm holds the distinction of being the first Swedish office to exhibit in the international section of the Venice Architecture Biennale (2004), and its founders were awarded the Prince Eugen Medal by King Carl XVI Gustaf in recognition of outstanding artistic achievement in architecture (2021).

Led today by the three founding partners alongside senior staff including Oliver Cap, Deta Koivisto Gemzell and Patrick Coan, the Stockholm office continues to advance a design language defined by spatial economy, material honesty and compositional restraint. The practice's award history spans ten American Good Design Awards (2009 to 2018), the Designpreis Deutschland Gold and Silver awarded by the Federal Republic of Germany (2011), Elle Deco Sweden Designer of the Year (2011) and Furniture of the Year (2012), and the Red Dot Design Award Best of the Best (2014), making Claesson Koivisto Rune the first office to hold the prestigious accolade across five distinct product categories simultaneously.