The design of the house is conditioned by its immediate surroundings. Located in a high-density residential area and surrounded by plots with built houses, the first impulse that appears is to create a sort of fortress, to protect the privacy of the occupants.
The beginning of the project is born from this will to be unnoticed. It is a figure as basic and simple as the cube, like a box, located in our plot, and from its interior you can observe what happens around you, to decide what we will let into our box, which is our home. The aim is to create the sensation of a closed, almost hermetic cube, which will surprise you once inside, and evoke precisely the opposite sensation, the feeling of a big space, luminosity, and relationship with the outside.
The north elevation constitutes the main facade of the house, it is a very exposed facade to the outside, and we use a traditional resource of Mediterranean architecture to generate a perforated facade that allows us to see without being seen. We use a ceramic lattice piece, produced in the area, creating a composition that not only gives us privacy but produces some beautiful light effects when the light passes through this lattice facade, which also changes according to the time of year and the position of the sun.
Once you cross the access door, screened by this lattice wall, we enter into a very bright interior space with a perspective background that leads us to a large window, with a backyard of selected vegetation. The position of each window of the house was carefully considered and was adapted as the work progressed, to control the visuals from the interior very well. We have used vegetation, as one more resource of architecture, to make the elements of the environment that interested us disappear from our interior visuals.
The materiality of the project seeks the line of a house built with sincere, natural materials that can age well without the need for excessive maintenance. They are materials such as natural lime mortar on the facade, ceramic pieces with natural tones, and cement floors. The choice of these materials often implies valuing imperfection and irregularity, but they are part of the natural beauty of the home.
The bedrooms are located on the first floor, embracing a “height patio” that is nothing more than a terrace whose limits rise like walls, to provide us with privacy from the other houses. From this gesture arises a private terrace space, whose wall is strategically perforated in the place where, somehow, we erase everything that bothers us from the landscape, and open a window to the mountain, and to the interesting views. Text description by the architects.
