Bitxo House stands on the gentle hills of the Pre-Pyrenean landscape of Graugés, a hundred kilometres north of Barcelona, in Catalonia, with the Queralt mountain range at the background. It is located in a suburban area between “mountain style” houses.
The owners, both of them musicians, acquired, about 20 years ago, a plot to fill the stave of life with their music. Over time, without rush. The design and construction of the house extended for over ten years.
In contact with the ground, the lines of the stave get broken, absorb the trace of an old path and set a diagonal on the site, which then serves to structure a hierarchic process, adding elements and processes. Such traces are used to actually think the house, and afterwards, build it, with an expressive concrete structure organizing a brick lattice, and a single slope roof below which all spaces are marked out by free-standing bodies lined with colourful glazed ceramic.
Besides being one of the few materials allowed by the restrictive local rules, brick also links the house to the ground, an emerging wall of the clay attaching the house to its roots, despite its unconventional geometry.
Starting at the entrance, below the lattice, the spaces and rooms are arranged, structured along the trace, in a spiral movement that initially follows the natural slope with a ramp leading to the kitchen, and a double-height dining and living rooms. The ascent continues, with half height levels to tight the spaces against the concrete slab of the roof in correspondence to the privacy of the main and secondary bedrooms and service rooms. The end of the walk, completed only in the project with a fireman’s pole, leads to the playing room for children, redundant element for the whole house is, in fact, their playground.