The Guest Pavilion is a freestanding extension of a beach house located at the rear of a long, narrow site that faces the Pacific Ocean.
By extracting and highlighting what was already there, such as some dimensions of the house and existing trees, we set out to not just build an extension in the vacant space but to renovate the entire backyard, creating a series of gardens.
As a consequence of the above, we built a two-story pavilion using a minimum footprint and maximum construction height, in order to free up as much space as possible on the site, while at the same time reaching a sufficient height to achieve a view of the sea above the existing house.
With this project, we seek to emphasize the relationship between the house and the garden, the interior and the exterior spaces, the intimate and the extroverted. In the cross-section, a succession of two staircases - arranged in a row, one on the inside and the other on the outside - allows the pavilion to be crossed, from exterior to interior, from one garden to the other.
This mismatch of meanings is reinforced by the material and spatial differentiation on the two floors. While on the ground floor the rooms are warm and dark, with very low ceilings and covered with wood on all sides (being interrupted by specific openings that allow access to the garden), on the second floor we built a very bright room with a high ceiling, completely glazed walls and without corners, thus trying to introduce the surrounding trees, the distant horizon of the sea and perhaps make us doubt that we are inside. Text description by the architects.
