Bunker mentality.

Bunkered into a street in suburban Amersfoort, this modern villa reinterprets the form of an urban patio house to create a brooding, potent presence in the Dutch landscape.

Zielhorst is a featureless n suburban accretion to the west of Amersfoort. Paradoxically (and somewhat surreally), the streets in this anonymous quarter are named after a selection of famous architects -- Palladiostraat, Hortastraat, Nervistraat and so on. Part of the district has been divided into modestly sized plots, ranging from 500-1000 sq m, for private sector dwellings. A former city councillor proposed that each of the new houses should be designed by contemporary Dutch architects. However what seemed in theory an innovative and essentially well-intended notion has in practice resulted in a collection of arbitrary and slightly self-regarding objects in the flat, suburban polder landscape. Any tangible sense of intimacy, place or cohesion is sadly lacking.

Van Berkel & Bos have formulated one of the more successful responses to this commodification of contemporary architecture. Their customised villa is conceived as a sloping form forced out of the earth -- a modern, man-made berm that exudes potent, geological presence. In fact it is a version of an urban patio house, arranged around a protected inner courtyard. This strategy of turning inward is the antithesis of the approach in the surrounding plots, where each house is treated like a static, sculptural object on a tray or a display in a shop window.

Instead, van Berkel & Bos' bunker-like dwelling on Aaltostraat registers as a series of apparently impenetrable, oblique planes rising gently from the street level on the south side of the site. The planes are coated with raw, rough gravel, of the type used in railway tracks. A narrow passage between the blind volume of the garage and one of the gravelled slopes leads to the concealed courtyard at the heart of the plan. Around this inner sanctum, the compact, single-storey volume of the house is arranged in an L-shaped configuration. The wide lower part of the L contains entrance lobby, kitchen and living area, while the narrower leg houses an enfilade of three bedrooms. A modular pod containing the bathroom protrudes from the bedroom wing into the courtyard. The plan embodies a logical circuit of domestic activities; progress through the spaces is sequential, from entering and cooking, through to living, sleeping and washing. A difference in floor levels marks the transition between living and sleeping quarters.

Minimally pointed brick cladding reinforces the house's curiously monolithic character. The dull grey wall planes are punctuated by slashes of glazing and detailing is predictably reductivist yet refined. Bedroom windows are extruded slightly from the wall surface, the extrusions covered by timber cowls, like slightly hooded eyes. Living and bedroom spaces overlook a parvis to the rear of the house containing a Zen-like swathe of shingle and a stiff squadron of trees; an austerely poetic response to the client's apparent dislike of gardening.

The villa's parti of an orthogonal system defined not by the horizontal floor, but by the gently sloping roof, invariably recalls Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West, which sought to connect with the surrounding Arizona desert. Here in the confines of Amersfoort suburbia, the quotidian presence of neighbours is hard to avoid, yet van Berkel & Bos have managed to turn a potent statement of introverted, urban domesticity into a brooding fragment of landscape that exists on its own terms.