Hasta La Ideas

Spanish practice Arquitecturia has completed a home in the Catalan town of Caldes de Malavella, which is comprised of six small buildings organised around a courtyard at its centre.

Girona-based Arquitecturia, led by Josep Camps and Olga Felip, designed House 016 to foster a close connection to both its site, which is surrounded by lawns and trees, and the internal garden.

“The house offers three ways to look at and relate to the outside: an intimate one into an inner courtyard…a horizontal one with framed views to different pieces of garden…[and] and open and wide view of the sky,” explained the practice.

“The size and proportion of each volume responds to its use, [and they] are all connected through a kind of cloister where the entrance is located,” it continued.

Around the central courtyard, a U-shaped corridor space connects each of the home’s blocks. This is fully glazed on one side to overlook the courtyard and on the other to look out at the landscape.

On entry, this corridor creates a long axis through the entire depth of the building, visually linking a living, dining and kitchen space to the northeast with three en-suite bedrooms opposite.

For the bedrooms, this organisation allows light to flood the spaces while maintaining privacy, with large windows looking inwards onto the planted courtyard.

Each of the home’s blocks is topped by an angular butterfly roof finished with green ceramic tiles, designed to channel rainwater down into the central garden.

The form of these sloping roofs has been used to give each block a triangular strip of windows, which are set in deep frames to minimise glare.

“The sloping gabled roof collects water like a leaf through the use of green-glazed ceramic tiles, which reflect and blend in with the trees,” said the practice.

“Some of this water is used to irrigate the garden, designed according to the principle of saving water with plants that require little watering,” it added.

Externally, the pale, board-marked concrete base of each block has been left exposed, contrasted by dark wooden frames for windows and doors and topped by a roofline finished in white timber batons.

Inside, the large ceilings of cross-laminated timber have been left exposed, complemented by wooden panelling to the walls and polished concrete floors that help to bounce light around the spaces.

Previous projects by Arquitectura include a timber-clad artist’s studio in Girona, with a large, central skylit space for creating and hanging paintings, and a swimming pool with ridged metal walls.

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