Casa Hikari unfolds almost entirely on the ground floor, conceived for a couple whose children have grown and left. This new chapter calls for a more horizontal, intimate architecture, closely bound to the landscape — one where circulation and views, not walls, become the true organizing principles.
The house is structured around a sequence of green spaces that guide visitors from the entrance toward the quiet edge of the lake. Rather than entering through the front, occupants follow a landscaped path into the heart of the plot, arriving at the house through a hall that opens onto the central courtyard. The entrance ceases to be merely functional, becoming instead a subtle bridge between exterior and interior, concrete and nature.
The courtyard is the heart of the house — it breathes, articulates, separates, and unites. Toward the front sit the more private and ancillary spaces: a guest room, a music room, and the service areas, each with its own identity within the whole. The communal spaces, by contrast, unfold toward the rear, facing the best views and dissolving gradually toward the lagoon.
The kitchen sits along this central axis, conceived not simply as a room but as a coordinating hub — a mechanism linking and serving both the front-facing spaces and those opening onto the garden.
From the courtyard, the house gradually opens toward the landscape. The social heart is a large, transverse living room, its glazed walls connecting it to the gallery and dissolving the boundary between inside and out when opened. Together, both programs form a single covered and semi-covered space, oriented entirely toward garden and water.
This sequence continues in a long, narrow pool — conceived less as a pool than as a line of water extending the view. Beyond it, the built form dissolves completely into the garden, meeting the edge of the lagoon in direct continuity, as if the house had decided never truly to end.
The only private room with views of both landscape and water is the master suite, concealed behind the house's large library. Its position is deliberate: a refuge with the horizon laid out ahead of it.
Formally, the house reads as an imposing, horizontal concrete volume, firmly rooted in the ground. Rising from this base is an unexpected counterpoint: a circular, organic crown that deliberately contrasts with the horizontality and orthogonality below, drawing the eye upward.
This upper volume holds a space designed for the youngest members of the family — a playful oasis, set apart from the rest of the house. Where the ground floor opens horizontally toward the garden and lake, the crown turns toward the sky, offering an entirely different spatial experience: a house within a house, suspended for those who still have all the time in the world ahead of them.
Casa Hikari is built from a succession of relationships — access, landscape, courtyard, architecture, water, lagoon. It is a house where circulation shapes the plan, and every space marks a gradual transition: between intimacy and sociability, the built and the natural, the domestic scale of the ground floor and the small, elevated universe reserved for the next generation.
Structural calculations: Eng. José Luis Pisani
Photographer / Website: Alejandro Peral - http://www.alejandroperal.net/
Interior design: SUMA interiorismo
Landscaping: Paisajismo El Camino
-Equipo: Arch. Ignacio Pessagno & Arch. Lilian Kandus
Arch. Lucila López
Arch. Denise Andreoli
I.D Sebastián Miguel
I.D Francisco Cortese
Arch. Denise Bardelli
Arch. Renata Stechina
M. Emilia Belardinelli