I receive many letters with questions about projects, construction and operation. liked it a lot throughout former USSR, there were also those who wanted to build one for themselves.
Sergey from Kyiv writes:
“Good day! I'm shocked!)))
I'm going to build a hexagonal house, similar to yours! And then I find your project.) I didn’t find your e-mail... I would like to write to you, discuss, there are many questions”
Oksana from Siberia writes:
"Sergey! We have a similar situation, we are thinking about the layout of the hexagon, I hope in the summer we will do the foundation. Please send me your sketches by email, if it’s not difficult.”
Nikita from Estonia writes:
“Hello, Sergey! This is simply the materialization of some kind of sensual ideas. I have planned a house for myself, but I don’t have money for expensive architects, and I don’t want an ordinary box house. I’ve been drawing the idea of a hexagon for six months now, so I decided to google it in a search and the first link to your project, and even with detailed drawings, thank you!”
Dmitry from Yekaterinburg writes:
“Sergey, I really liked your project, its simplicity and at the same time originality are very captivating. You will allow us to use your project, and we will tell all our friends that this is the project of Sergei Ozerny from Belarus :-)))))"
Sergey from Kyiv shared his vision of a hexagonal house and sent sketches, which I publish with my comments.
Initially, Sergei wrote to me that he plans to provide lighting for the attic daylight through "dormer windows". Frankly, I was skeptical about this idea, because I really don’t like “chicken coops” sticking out to the sides from the roof plane. Nevertheless, when I saw these sketches, I agreed that this option has the right to life and looks decent.
But it seems to me that three small windows, as shown, will not be enough. It’s probably not possible to make a dormer window in every slope. best option, it will look too “overloaded”. In my opinion, there are two solutions, the first is to make continuous glazing dormer window, i.e. window triangular shape, this will significantly increase the area of the window and will look beautiful with dark time day, will emphasize the original silhouette and the very idea of the house. The second option can be combined with the first - add Velux roof windows to the three free slopes. Dormer windows very good and romantic in themselves. Sleep under such a window, watch raindrops or snowflakes fall on you, see on a clear night starry sky above you and all this without getting out of bed... What could be more romantic?
The next two problematic elements are the porch and gazebo/canopy. In the form they are in the sketches, they completely kill the entire project. Any extensions, attachments, porches and awnings that are not architecturally and structurally connected with the main structure look extremely poor.
I suggest next solution for the porch - extend part of the roof plane downwards (above the door) in the form. Such a solution will be fully functional, i.e. will serve as a canopy over the porch; it will not kill the house, but, on the contrary, will emphasize all the advantages of this project.
The same situation is with the gazebo/canopy - you need to extend the plane of the roof slope downwards. Required to draw different shapes and choose the most aesthetically acceptable one. You can simply extend the downward slope, maintaining general shape regular triangle, you can mirror the triangle down, you will get an irregular rhombus, you can choose some kind of angular asymmetrical shape, but always in the same plane with the main slope of the roof.
There is one more disadvantage - “two pipes”. We must try to fit all the chimneys and ventilation ducts required by the house into “one pipe”; usually this is not an easy task, but today there are a lot of flexible, rigid, elbow and other types of ventilation ducts and chimneys. If, due to the layout, it is not possible to get by with just one pipe, you still need to try to minimize aesthetic losses.
I don’t comment on the internal layout; here everyone decides for himself what is more convenient, comfortable and attractive for him. I like Sergei's version attic floor– a single spacious room. But, in connection with the layout of the first floor, the question arises - where will the children live, and if they are not planned, then where will the guests stay overnight?
Moreover, the stove, windows, and even furniture are in the shape of a hexagon. Why did the owner need such a hut?
This house in the village of Ufa-Shigiri is visible from afar. You won’t see anything similar not only here, but probably in the whole country. Main feature buildings are hexagonal in shape. Erects original design friendly Galimyanov family. The most difficult thing, the builders admit, was external finishing. After all, even here there were some hexagons.
Ilfat Galimyanov: “The first boards went from below and were laid one on top of the other. Slowly, observing all the dimensions, and we succeeded.”
Hexagonal trim scales, hexagonal windows and exactly the same stove - also hexagonal. Even the furniture will be made to order to match the unusual structure. In this house - according to the plan - everything should have six corners.
An important condition for a hexagonal house is that it must be built without fail kind people. As the hostess says, every nail here is loaded positive energy. Baba Katya, as the locals call the owner of the house, became the ideological inspirer of this construction. Unusual shape everything around her is not just her whim.
The woman is sure there will be a special one here positive energy. She even carefully selected the location for such a house: “There are places that are energetically rich, with more eruptions coming from the ground than anywhere else. There is a form of a house that collects energy - it’s easy to live there.”
It’s easy to live in the house, but none of the Galimyanovs are going to move into the building. Despite the fact that Baba Katya has 10 grandchildren and 5 great-grandchildren, the hexagonal structure will only be a place for family meetings and energy recharge.
Finnish entrepreneur Jon Uyanen used the paradoxes of octagonal geometry and built a super-economical octagonal house from aspen.
Who among us does not dream of a dacha or a summer cottage, hunting lodge or a chalet in the mountains where you can return after ski trip, warm up by the fireplace - in general, about a place where you can hide from everyday worries and spend time in pleasant relaxation? Surprisingly, the desire to be lazy in the country encourages us to work more! And then one day the day comes when a person comes out of his dreamy state and begins to build the house of his dreams.
Jon Uyanen also had a dream. But unlike those who would be happy to have four walls and a roof, Jon wanted something more. He dreamed of an octagonal wooden house.
Octagon
The idea of an octagonal house design is not new: even today you can find religious buildings - churches and temples - of an octagonal shape, not only in Europe, but also in Asia, where the number eight is associated with infinity, and therefore with immortality.
However, octagons gained real popularity as a home for living in the mid-19th century in America. This is associated with the name of the scientist Orson Fowler, who built an octagonal house for his family and wrote the book "The Octagonal House: A Home for Everyone or a New, Cheap, Convenient and Superior Way of Building." The book was first published in 1848 and set the fashion for octagonal home construction for half a century, and not only for aesthetic reasons.
As can be seen from the figure, with the same length of the perimeter of the house, the octagon has approximately 20% more space compared to the traditional one cubic shape. This means that with the same wall area inside the house there will be more rooms, and heating costs will decrease. Fowler calculated that an octagon is cheaper to build, its design is more stable and reliable than a cube, there is more living space that receives more natural light, the house is easier to heat, and it keeps cooler better in the summer. All these advantages directly follow from the geometry of space: octagonal shape- this is an approach to a sphere that would be the most effective if only there were furniture in nature that could be placed inside the ball.
"At first it was just an octagonal dream"
So, Jon Uyanen, a Finnish entrepreneur who produces plastic products, dreamed and dreamed and... dreamed home. He owns a small island in the middle of the lake, where Jon built his octagonal cottage with an area of 120 square meters. meters. And although the house is not high, its unique position and unusual design make it like a lighthouse, illuminating the sea in all directions.
The house is built from aspen frames. This style is widespread in Finland: logs are sawn into half-beams, and gusset performed by the so-called “Norwegian castle”. Wooden house from the gun carriage it looks so good and at the same time beautiful that it does not need to be sheathed on the outside.
As a rule, northern pine wood is used for half-beams, but Jon chose aspen - an excellent material light yellow color with a greenish tint, durable, dense, does not crack and is easy to process.
To lay such a house, you needed a carriage with two opposite sides that were perfectly flat and geometrically precisely sawn.
How to make the perfect half-beam
Jon Uyanen, being a technically savvy person and a perfectionist by nature, delved into everything technical details construction. To get a gun carriage required quality, Jon explored the available options and found a great solution: the Wood-Mizer LT15 sawmill. This was his first introduction to narrow band saw cutting technology, and the result lived up to his expectations: the carriage turned out to be of exceptionally high quality due to the precision of the cut and the smoothness of the sawn surface.
A few years later, there was a knock on the door at Wood-Mizer's Finnish office. On the threshold was Jon Uyanen, who, as eyewitnesses say, struck everyone with an unusual sparkle in his eyes.
“I want to buy from you here...” Jon began. “One of these of yours... I need to saw something...”
Typical of Yon - a man who doesn't like to talk in vain.
“Okay,” the Wood-Mizer representative answered in surprise, rejoicing in his soul at the fastest deal in his career. “Why do you need this?” - just in case, he asked.
"I will build a large octagonal house. Much larger than my cottage. It will be made of massive aspen logs. And the best cutting accuracy and the most smooth surface- this is the main thing that is needed in such a project. I already know."
And so Jon, a man who never wastes words, turned his dream into reality. The photo shows his octagonal house. You don't see a design like this very often.
"Are you satisfied with the result of your work?"
“I’m just happy! In such projects you have to make compromises - you do some things well, and others - how they turn out. And then you are forced to live with this relative balance. But when you work on the LT15 machine, it’s a completely different matter. No compromises! This is a very good combination of lightness, speed, accuracy and safety of work. This is the most reliable machine I know for producing a carriage. highest quality".
Based on materials from Martti Kirsiti
Towards the evening of the day we moved into the hut, a snowstorm began. We lit the stove, turned on the light, sat among a pile of bags and trunks and were glad that the construction ended on time. The only furniture in the house was a table, a bench and a bed, and there was still a lot of minor finishing work to be done, but most of the construction was already behind us. In addition to the size of the house, the timing of construction was also quite impressive. Despite the almost three-week delay in leaving the village, despite some technical hiccups, Bure alone (!!!) managed to build our warm winter hut before the frosts. In three weeks. I have no help in the construction, considering the children. I mostly sat in the tent and brewed buckets of mint tea for our builder))) 
So, we reached the lake already in the evening twilight on September 6th. In the morning, Bure and Afanas unloaded the Ural and went to cut down the forest. As it turned out, there was literally nothing to knock down. mountain river, with which our lake is connected by a channel, is carried away by a stormy spring water(or after heavy rains) a lot of trees. Due to the layer of permafrost, which in these parts reaches almost to the surface of the earth, the roots of trees grow shallowly, no more than half a meter, but they grow in width. But if the soil softens, nothing can keep twenty- or even thirty-meter trees on the wrong soil. The guys consulted and decided to use driftwood with a noble silvery coating and windfall, which was piled up by hurricane winds this summer, for construction. This turned out to be a plus - more than half of the harvested logs had already been sanded by the river itself. Bure was very happy that he didn’t have to fell those tall ones, beautiful trees, which have been growing along the shores of lakes and rivers for hundreds of years. 
It took several days to prepare required quantity building materials, and already on the tenth Bure began construction. Afanas was pressed for time - he only took a few days off from work, and he needed to return to the village as soon as possible. 
Bure, stocking up on gasoline, began to build. A long time ago, a hexagonal house was planned; the first crown was the three heaviest logs. Logs of three and a half meters, which are, of course, more convenient to carry in one person than four-meter logs. The driftwood is generally quite heavy, as it gradually becomes saturated with water. Until about the third crown, the logs were literally too heavy to lift, so Bure threw them onto the wall using a whole system of weights and logs. Moss was laid between the logs, about a bag for two logs, fortunately, there are no problems with moss in the taiga. Then, when the walls were raised, I at least caulked the walls again, starting with north side, since there was already a scientist - on Solbokar, by the time I reached the northern wall, frosts had struck, the wet moss between the logs had frozen into an icy, impenetrable crust, and then our entire northern wall was terribly cold.
The weather was changing. Sometimes it was drizzling, sometimes the snow fell and melted, the winds blew, fraying the golden decoration from the larches. The house grew. At some point, the chainsaw stalled, and Bure, in order not to lose momentum, switched to an ax and saw, gratefully remembering the men who adolescence taught him to build with an axe. 
The walls rose. The inner wall was three meters long. Six walls of three meters each. This is gorgeous, guys))) The height of the wall is about one and a half meters, and then the roof goes up. Very free. The windows were laid out on the south and southeast sides, the door was in the northeast. What was unexpectedly pleasant was that in the hexagonal room the light spreads a little differently, and with three windows we ended up with such a bright room that neither a fairy tale nor a pen could describe it.
One day Bure laid down logs that became the basis for the roof. 
Next, boards were laid, on top of roofing felt, and a layer of turf. Bure was in a great hurry to dig up the turf before the frosts, because there is nothing worse than digging and picking at frozen turf with hands already cracked from fishing in the cold wind. But we were lucky - there was sunny weather, Bure cut squares of approximately 50x100 cm with a shovel, and it took almost 60 of these rectangles for our entire roof. When the roof was ready, Bure laid brick stove(yes, yes, we brought with us two hundred more bricks! By the way, local, Sasyr production, however, from the times of the USSR), the stove is offset from the center so that on one side we get a cozy nook, there we have a “bedroom”, and on the other on the other side there is a spacious hall, bright and with a high (two eighty!!!) ceiling. 
The stove dried out for several days, then I whitewashed it, it became light and elegant. By the way, an oven was installed in the stove, which was also brought from the village. I haven’t baked anything in it yet, but as soon as I try it, I’ll tell you right away.))) 
Next came the turn of the windows. The first window was made in the same way with an axe, and by the second window the chainsaw suddenly came to life, and things went faster. The windows are also lined with moss, and in October or November Afanas will bring more glass to make double panes even warmer. 
The floorboards, sawn and planed, also came with us from the village. The floor is two-level, the hallway is lower, living room higher. This is good, because my son actively crawls, lives on the floor, and we needed a warm floor. By the way, the floor level was measured with a camera. Good feature, I'm glad that I finally found a use for it))) 
And finally, the door. The door turned out to be authentic. It so happened that we forgot door hinges, and I had to remember the experience of my ancestors, so to speak. We saw a similar door fastening in the Yakut Khoton Museum on the Bayaga River. Very good decision! After the move, the door was covered with skins inside and out, I’ll show you this a little later, when we’ve finished sorting things out, finishing the shelves, every little thing, putting things in order, and we can show off the interior. 