The Zaonezhie Retreat in Kazhma is a timber campus on Lake Onega that synchronizes hospitality with the pace of village life. Orthogonal shingled volumes, pierced by calibrated glazing, cluster a hotel, two guest houses, and a sauna around grassy mounds shaped by the site. The ensemble merges local craft, austere form, and ecological care into a measured whole.
Zaonezhie Retreat Technical Information
- Architects: RHIZOME
- Location: Kazhma village, Medvezhyegorsky District, Republic of Karelia, Russia
- Gross Area: 1,085 m2 | 11,679 Sq. Ft.
- Project Years: 2020 – 2024
- Photographs: © Dmitry Chebanenko
Rather than erase the site’s irregular traces, we worked with them, letting timber, craft, and a found topography set the project’s order and its dialogue with the lake.
– Tatiana Sinelnikova and Eugeny Reshetov
Zaonezhie Retreat Photographs
Site, Intent, and Programmatic Framework
The project occupies a lakeside plot in Kazhma, a village shaped by outmigration and seasonal use. The retreat positions hospitality as a public interface rather than a closed compound. Buildings are strategically distributed to preserve views of Lake Onega and to stage measured encounters between visitors and the village, allowing for privacy where needed while keeping paths and thresholds legible. Orientation and spacing register prevailing winds, sun paths, and the soft gradient to the water.
The campus consists of two guest houses, a sauna, and a hotel. Each volume maintains a distinct roofline and proportion yet belongs to a standard order of rectilinear masses, timber cladding, and disciplined openings. The hotel anchors shared life, combining guest rooms with a restaurant and library, while a multipurpose hall extends the program toward cultural and wellness events. The ensemble invites different temporalities of use, from quiet stays to seasonal gatherings, without overburdening the village fabric.
Spatial Organization and Public–Private Gradation
The hotel’s ground level concentrates the most public functions: lobby, bar, restaurant, and a library-lounge. These rooms wrap a compact service core that borrows the logic of northern Pomor huts, where storage and workrooms are nested as insulated blocks. The arrangement clarifies front-of-house and back-of-house relationships, shortens service routes, and stabilizes acoustic conditions along the public edge.
Guest rooms occupy the upper level as a band of compact accommodations. Circulation aligns with the building perimeter to maximize outlook and reduce cross-traffic, while window openings are tuned to frame the lake or filtered views of trees. The multipurpose hall, dimensioned as a calm, proportionally generous volume, operates as the conceptual center. Controlled daylight, sparse finishes, and long sightlines create a measured spatial atmosphere, suited to yoga, readings, or small performances, which strengthens collective use without visual noise.
Architectural Language, Envelope, and Fenestration
The massing adopts simple orthogonal forms composed with near-Suprematist clarity. This formal restraint sets up a productive contrast with the site’s folded, irregular terrain, so that crisp edges heighten the reading of the landscape and the terrain, in turn, softening the architecture’s geometry. Roof planes and gables are kept unembellished to foreground proportion, junctions, and the cadence of openings.
Facades are clad in wooden shingles, or lemekh, tying the ensemble to northern timber precedents and contemporary restoration practices associated with the Kizhi pogost area. The envelope thickens at sills and jambs to manage water and snow, while battens and shingle coursing lend a fine-grained scale. A horizontal band of volokovye windows on the western elevation reinterprets vernacular strip glazing to set a collective horizon line. The continuous band modulates interior light, reduces glare over long rooms, and choreographs views as a series of layered vignettes rather than singular panoramas.
Materiality, Making, and Regional Economy
Locally sourced timber, often rough-cut and dimensionally inconsistent, is used as is. Tolerances become a design driver: cladding tolerates slight variation through coursing and overlap, while interior joinery adopts reveals that accept movement and seasonal change. The visible presence of knots, checks, and grain patterns is not concealed but composed, giving depth to surfaces without applied ornament.
Construction involved local craftsmen, aligning maintenance with existing skills and supply chains. Knowledge embedded in shingle laying, log carpentry logic, and simple mechanical fixes reduces long-term dependency on specialized contractors. Service and storage components reference Pomor typologies, translating their compact, thermally buffered compartments into contemporary kitchens, staff rooms, and equipment stores. The result is an infrastructure that reads as coherent architecture rather than a concealed service maze.
Landscape Strategy and Ecological Stewardship
The site had been reshaped by earlier earthworks, leaving small mounds that gradually naturalized into grassy hummocks. The project retains and amplifies this found topography, treating it as a carrier of memory and a working hydrological device. Paths and terraces slip between mounds to maintain soil permeability, slow runoff, and keep snow storage out of circulation lines. Built edges meet the ground with minimal cut-and-fill, allowing the architecture to sit lightly on the terrain.
Planting enriches an existing mosaic of grasses and wild species, avoiding monocultures and preserving self-seeded communities. Low-intensity maintenance and porous ground treatments protect the nesting habitats associated with Lake Onega’s bird populations. Lighting is restrained, with warm color temperatures and cutoffs to limit spill, and circulation is organized as short, legible routes rather than continual loops. Architecture, landscape, and local ecologies are set in dialogue, where modest interventions support resilience while sustaining the cultural memory of the Russian North.
Zaonezhie Retreat Plans
Zaonezhie Retreat Image Gallery
About RHIZOME
RHIZOME is an architecture studio based in Russia, founded in 2011. The firm engages with existing contexts through minimal yet potent architectural interventions that emphasize material specificity, spatial clarity, and responsiveness to cultural and ecological settings. Their work often explores contemporary continuities of vernacular traditions, embedding new programs within local landscapes and economies.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Lead Architects: Tatiana Sinelnikova, Eugeny Reshetov
- Design Team: Ekaterina Rostova, Yana Demina, Ilya Belyakov, Valeria Levshankina
- Client: Two brothers with personal ties to Kazhma village
- Other contributors: Shingles (lemekh) produced and mounted by restorers from Kizhi Island
