Logistics of a working family typically requires family members to stay tethered to their homes for longer periods than each would prefer. This can become disruptive to your wellness when all your time at school, work and home is spent indoors. The homeowners began to contemplate, like many families do, whether they would move to the suburbs in exchange for great public parks and amenities for a backyard. Rather than moving far away, they decided to make a bold change by building a new house that flipped the script on indoor home life on a small urban lot.
This house, set on a steep slope covered with typical Brazilian savanna vegetation, is located in front of a preserved area facing mountain views. Its location strategy, longitudinal to the terrain’s contour lines, is defined by the extensive cover concrete slab, which is fluidly inserted according to the specific needs of the program and the terrain.
The project consists in the refurbishment of a penthouse located in the Costa Blanca of the Mediterranean Sea.
The main floor, articulated in a single room, seeks continuity between the kitchen, the living room, the terrace and the landscape. On the upper floor, where the night area is located, the master bedroom opens out to the sea through a terrace and has a large dressing room that meets each one of the clients’ preferences.
In order to delimit the spaces different elements are used. On the one hand, the staircase, made of white stone, conceived as a sculptural element that, together with the kitchen as furniture, allow the use of spaces. On the other hand, a black stone element includes the humid areas and serves to configure the space of the master bedroom.
Boosting the views of the Bay of Altea becomes the last and most important element of this proposal.
Principal in Charge: Fran Silvestre, Ricardo Candela
Collaborator: María Masià, Estefanía Soriano, Pablo Camarasa, Sandra Insa, Sevak Asatrián, Ricardo Candela David Sastre, Vicente Picó, Rubén March, Jose Manuel Arnao, Rosa Juanes, Gemma Aparicio Paz Garcia-España, Ángel Pérez, Juan Fernandez, Javi Hinojosa, Pau Ricós, Andrea Baldo, Blanca Larraz, Juan Sanchis, Jorge Puig, Carlos Lucas, Miguel Massa, Paloma Feng, Alicia Simón
Hara house is located in the agricultural village of Tsurugasone, formerly known as Nakanoshima, in Nagaoka city, Niigata prefecture. The village is in the conventional Japanese village style wherein, a single estate contains an assemblage of buildings and farmland, that are inter-dependent on each other. This village is facing the same problems that many of Japan’s villages are facing; a rural decline, where new self-contained buildings superimpose themselves onto the land and create a larger and larger separation between the residents.
Eventually, the clients will inherit their large family estate which similarly, already has many built structure upon it such as the main family house, a work shed, parking area and a green house. Thus in this setting, our design direction was to create a building that revitalizes the structures already present onsite and have the potential to adapt to new functions as the need or mood arises.
A listed, regional modernist, low office building at Frogner, Oslo is re-purposed onto a residential building with nine apartments in varying sizes, spanning from 77 to 196 m2. The original project was built in 1973, designed by architects Trond Eliassen and Birger Lambertz-Nilssen, they were awarded the “Sundt” prize for architecture due to “Munthes gate”-complex’s outstanding quality. The building is now listed as propper representative for architecture of its period. The transformation strives to preserve this particular character, while giving the building a new life.
This modest home is designed to occupy the footprint of an existing cabin nestled among native conifers on a steep hillside along the shore of the southern Puget Sound. The clients wish to live in close proximity to the sea, where they could tend to oyster beds and be able to enjoy their shared passion for saltwater scuba diving on site. Working with a modest budget and significant site constraints led to a humble and compact form, while creating selective areas of floor to ceiling glass allowed for visual connections to the sea from nearly every room in the home.
A float home renovation situated along the north end of Lake Union in Seattle. The envelope of the existing home was retained to honor the restrictions of shoreline development. Conceptually, the interior palette is intended to harness and amplify the natural light. The exterior is given a material contrast of muted, dark tones to provide rest to the eyes when approaching by foot or boat.
The project is located in a small town of Provence called Gréasque, in a rural environment largely covered by oak and pine trees.
At the edge between a housing area and a forest, our proposal takes advantage of the morphology of the site and its strong topography. A simple linear geometry placed on a hill, makes it possible to exploit at best the climatic and visual qualities of the plot.
This project aims to make this site habitable by protecting itself from the major wind (the mistral) and by opening on the landscape.
Our concept for this 7500sf single family residence completed in 2017, was derived from the site/context, the clients desire for an indoor/outdoor living experience afforded by the southern California climate and inspiration from noted artist Richard Serra’s 1975 Delineator.