Photographs: Rory Gardiner
The origin of the concept of Alferez house comes from the idea of a cabin in the wood and its romantic felling of a protective shelter in the middle of the forest. I wanted the house to look like a cube which would have crashed on the floor, among the trees.
The design of the house is based on 3 points:
1. The project responds to the idea of an isolated house in the forest, without ever losing sight on the need for a strong feeling of security ; a house like a vault, made of concrete that protects and cares for its inhabitants.
The result is a mix of languages, on one hand the cabin as the romantic part of the project and the other hand the fortress as the brutalist protective part of the project.
The ground floor is almost blind, meanwhile the windows are placed on a very high level where you can’t reach them from the outside, opening views toward the sky and the pine trees on the inside.
2. The structural project has a very compact footprint, in order to avoid a complex and expensive foundation due to the topography of the land, with the idea to grow the height of the house to create a second ground floor on top of the house, the suspended rooftop terrace in the middle of the trees.
The rooftop is the morning area, meanwhile the natural ground floor is the afternoon area. The house seems like dropped as un unstable box on top of the natural slope of the land, cantilevered on its south corner, and sunken on the opposite north corner.
The project recreates the feeling of a cabin suspended on top of the natural topography of its land. The structure expresses this contradiction, generating a singular contrast between the feeling of lightness of a cabin, balanced by the weight of the concrete and the fortress personality of the house.
3. The house is looking for the light among the trees and a relationship with the crown of those majestic pine trees.
Following the logic of its compact footprint of 9 X 9 meters, the purpose of the project has been to grow vertically, instead of horizontally, to allow people to touch the branches of the tall pine trees.
The configuration of the house has been developed in half levels organized around a double height, giving the house this cathedral feeling and proportion on the inside, with light entering everywhere from the top, through those very high windows and skylights in the ceiling.
Then the double height diffuses the light through the entire inner space and compensate the loss of windows on the ground floor.
