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House and Yoga Studio in Sant Cugat
House and Yoga Studio in Sant Cugat
Barcelona, Spain
Project Featured on Jul 17, 2015
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House and Yoga Studio in Sant Cugat
Barcelona, Spain
Project Featured on Jul 17, 2015
Type
STATUS
Built
YEAR
2015
SIZE
5000 sqft - 10,000 sqft
BUDGET
Undisclosed
House and yoga centre, Sant Cugat del Vallès (Barcelona)
The house is inserted into a residential area which has recently witnessed the building of new houses with very dissimilar, attention-grabbing shapes and designs; these form a contrast with the few extant old houses and their delightful gardens. The plot has access from the street on its northern side and presents a gentle southwards slope with distant views of the hills of Collserola. In this somewhat nondescript garden city, which is, however, well communicated and equipped, we encounter no clear reference to provide continuity to, apart from the pebbledash and simple shapes of the old houses.
The house and yoga centre is for a couple with two small children. The couple works from home (she is a yoga professor and the centre’s owner) and is highly sensitive towards design and energy saving. The clients would like a house with nooks and crannies that is light-filled, sustainable and warm in feeling. From the first they declared their interest in caring for the house themselves and in avoiding excessive electrical automation.
We posited, therefore, an inward-looking (introverted??) house with a self-effacing façade organized around a tree-filled patio opening towards the south, a garden and the views. For its onstruction we used cross-laminated timber structure combined with slim metal supports. This efficient and light system was elaborated as a delicate piece of furniture atop a stone temple for the practising of yoga, in such a way that its precise and meticulous detailing was of a piece with the sensibility of its inhabitants. The outside of the overall structure is clad in thermal insulation and a pebbledash of small gravel similar to that of the area’s older houses. On the street side the house is practically windowless with the public access to the yoga room clearly differentiated from the private entrance of the house.
The yoga centre opens towards the street via two ample stepped patios surrounded by a light handrail; these function as meeting places and transitional spaces between the local neighbourhood and the centre. Two large glazed openings permit the inside of the centre to be seen and provide access to it. A stairway and a long vine-covered ramp connect the street directly to the inner patio that provides access to the yoga centre. Upon entering the reception area and waiting room, directly over the threshold, an elongated, high roof lantern, which functions as a chimney and provides natural ventilation, suffuses the space with warm light as a counterpoint to the cold light that enters from the skylight to the north. A longish running bench gives way to the changing rooms and the yoga hall: a diaphanous deep space lit from the side by a sequence of windows that give onto the access ramp and from the top by a circular roof lantern over the altar and the yoga teacher’s place at the far end of the room.
Access to the house is through a garden on the other side of a thick high fence, with a pathway leading to a small recessed porch that shields the entrance door.
Once inside the house, a confluence of hallways and storage spaces points in different directions. To one side, hidden behind a backdrop-like curtain, a small space allows people to divest themselves of their appurtenances upon arrival: overcoats, helmets, pushchairs, keys, bags or shoes. Another slit in the same curtain opens onto a long dressing room: a private, secret passage that leads to the bathroom and master bedroom and .
On the other side, a second way forward through a somewhat smaller and narrow hallway which intensifies the experience of crossing it leads to the communal space, the heart of the house. The experience is accentuated by the smell given off by the larch wood covering the hall walls. Y, por último, a la derecha se accede a un espacio octogonal que alberga una escalera de madera en espiral. This space, which serves as a hinge to the different routes through the house, generates a small chamfer on the outside corner of the façade which, although appreciable, is not finally understandable from the exterior. On its inside it is a big triple-height wooden case through which one goes up to the children’s bedrooms or goes down privately to the yoga centre or accedes from the vestibule to the sequence of service spaces formed by the laundry room, the pantry, a space for domestic appliances and, finally, the kitchen and dining room. The kitchen has direct access to the strip of garden at the side, where the vehicles are parked and where, behind some wooden partitions, the washing is dried.
The house is a collection of interconnected boxes, almost all of them with more than one entrance. At first sight their seemingly labyrinthine organization is not conducive to an understanding of the house, but this is gradually revealed as one moves through it. The different itineraries embrace the main spaces of the house, set out around the central patio: study, lounge, dining room and an informal lounge that occupies an almost freestanding pavilion that swivels slightly in order to partially close off the patio. Joined to the house at one corner, this pavilion floats in the middle of the garden and is slightly sunken in order to adapt to the gentle slope of the land. The west façade of the patio (which conceals the master bedroom behind it) is the only blank façade and is stuccoed like the outside of the house so that the leaves of the trees project their shadows over it of an afternoon, with films eventually being projected on it at night.
Situated at the southern end of the house and marking the end point of all the itineraries, the pavilion is protected from the sun by roller blinds of pinewood strips that are manually regulated and hang from a delicate metal support which separates them from the windows halfway down, giving a gentle curve to their fall. The system formed by the blinds and their support configures a broad space between the interior of the pavilion and the garden, a space of transition and light-filtering that, combined with the big sash windows on their perimeter, can almost become an open-air interior (the paintings of Ramon Casas take it upon themselves to remind us of the environmental and atmospheric quality these simple blinds provide when combined with good natural ventilation).
The swivelling of the pavilion and the newly planted trees delimit the seasonal alfresco dining areas: there is one in the central patio and another next to the kitchen. The first is shady in summer from one in the afternoon onwards, and the second has direct light during lunch time in spring and autumn. The kitchen and dining room receive a long ray of direct sunlight on winter mornings and a tree protects the kitchen window from the setting sun at the same time as providing privacy from the house next door.
The extending outwards of the wooden floors generates wide eaves that together with the varying angle of the sun during the different seasons permit the interior space to be heated when the sun is lower in winter and prevent the rays of the sun from affecting the inside of the house when it is higher in summer. The ends of the eaves also incorporate wooden blinds that regulate the incursion of sunlight in the intermediate seasons and control the glare.
The house has both sash and awning windows with integrated mosquito netting and insulated glazing with argon gas and solar control. These are placed in such a way that all the spaces have cross-ventilation. On summer nights a roof lantern over the octagonal space housing the staircase is opened to produce an updraft, which results in natural night cooling that replenishes and refreshes the air inside the house. There is geothermal under-floor heating beneath the ceramic tiles, custom made by Cerámica Cumella. Their colour was chosen to be dark enough to absorb the solar energy and light enough to avoid people’s footprints being visible. The central patio is paved with sandstone flagstones of the same size as the indoor ceramic floor tiles. Rainwater runoff from the green roof is collected in a 15,000-litre cistern for watering the garden.The house obtained the Class A energy rating with an annual energy consumption of 29 kWh/m2 and emissions of 7 kg of CO2/m2 a year.
The house is inserted into a residential area which has recently witnessed the building of new houses with very dissimilar, attention-grabbing shapes and designs; these form a contrast with the few extant old houses and their delightful gardens. The plot has access from the street on its northern side and presents a gentle southwards slope with distant views of the hills of Collserola. In this somewhat nondescript garden city, which is, however, well communicated and equipped, we encounter no clear reference to provide continuity to, apart from the pebbledash and simple shapes of the old houses.
The house and yoga centre is for a couple with two small children. The couple works from home (she is a yoga professor and the centre’s owner) and is highly sensitive towards design and energy saving. The clients would like a house with nooks and crannies that is light-filled, sustainable and warm in feeling. From the first they declared their interest in caring for the house themselves and in avoiding excessive electrical automation.
We posited, therefore, an inward-looking (introverted??) house with a self-effacing façade organized around a tree-filled patio opening towards the south, a garden and the views. For its onstruction we used cross-laminated timber structure combined with slim metal supports. This efficient and light system was elaborated as a delicate piece of furniture atop a stone temple for the practising of yoga, in such a way that its precise and meticulous detailing was of a piece with the sensibility of its inhabitants. The outside of the overall structure is clad in thermal insulation and a pebbledash of small gravel similar to that of the area’s older houses. On the street side the house is practically windowless with the public access to the yoga room clearly differentiated from the private entrance of the house.
The yoga centre opens towards the street via two ample stepped patios surrounded by a light handrail; these function as meeting places and transitional spaces between the local neighbourhood and the centre. Two large glazed openings permit the inside of the centre to be seen and provide access to it. A stairway and a long vine-covered ramp connect the street directly to the inner patio that provides access to the yoga centre. Upon entering the reception area and waiting room, directly over the threshold, an elongated, high roof lantern, which functions as a chimney and provides natural ventilation, suffuses the space with warm light as a counterpoint to the cold light that enters from the skylight to the north. A longish running bench gives way to the changing rooms and the yoga hall: a diaphanous deep space lit from the side by a sequence of windows that give onto the access ramp and from the top by a circular roof lantern over the altar and the yoga teacher’s place at the far end of the room.
Access to the house is through a garden on the other side of a thick high fence, with a pathway leading to a small recessed porch that shields the entrance door.
Once inside the house, a confluence of hallways and storage spaces points in different directions. To one side, hidden behind a backdrop-like curtain, a small space allows people to divest themselves of their appurtenances upon arrival: overcoats, helmets, pushchairs, keys, bags or shoes. Another slit in the same curtain opens onto a long dressing room: a private, secret passage that leads to the bathroom and master bedroom and .
On the other side, a second way forward through a somewhat smaller and narrow hallway which intensifies the experience of crossing it leads to the communal space, the heart of the house. The experience is accentuated by the smell given off by the larch wood covering the hall walls. Y, por último, a la derecha se accede a un espacio octogonal que alberga una escalera de madera en espiral. This space, which serves as a hinge to the different routes through the house, generates a small chamfer on the outside corner of the façade which, although appreciable, is not finally understandable from the exterior. On its inside it is a big triple-height wooden case through which one goes up to the children’s bedrooms or goes down privately to the yoga centre or accedes from the vestibule to the sequence of service spaces formed by the laundry room, the pantry, a space for domestic appliances and, finally, the kitchen and dining room. The kitchen has direct access to the strip of garden at the side, where the vehicles are parked and where, behind some wooden partitions, the washing is dried.
The house is a collection of interconnected boxes, almost all of them with more than one entrance. At first sight their seemingly labyrinthine organization is not conducive to an understanding of the house, but this is gradually revealed as one moves through it. The different itineraries embrace the main spaces of the house, set out around the central patio: study, lounge, dining room and an informal lounge that occupies an almost freestanding pavilion that swivels slightly in order to partially close off the patio. Joined to the house at one corner, this pavilion floats in the middle of the garden and is slightly sunken in order to adapt to the gentle slope of the land. The west façade of the patio (which conceals the master bedroom behind it) is the only blank façade and is stuccoed like the outside of the house so that the leaves of the trees project their shadows over it of an afternoon, with films eventually being projected on it at night.
Situated at the southern end of the house and marking the end point of all the itineraries, the pavilion is protected from the sun by roller blinds of pinewood strips that are manually regulated and hang from a delicate metal support which separates them from the windows halfway down, giving a gentle curve to their fall. The system formed by the blinds and their support configures a broad space between the interior of the pavilion and the garden, a space of transition and light-filtering that, combined with the big sash windows on their perimeter, can almost become an open-air interior (the paintings of Ramon Casas take it upon themselves to remind us of the environmental and atmospheric quality these simple blinds provide when combined with good natural ventilation).
The swivelling of the pavilion and the newly planted trees delimit the seasonal alfresco dining areas: there is one in the central patio and another next to the kitchen. The first is shady in summer from one in the afternoon onwards, and the second has direct light during lunch time in spring and autumn. The kitchen and dining room receive a long ray of direct sunlight on winter mornings and a tree protects the kitchen window from the setting sun at the same time as providing privacy from the house next door.
The extending outwards of the wooden floors generates wide eaves that together with the varying angle of the sun during the different seasons permit the interior space to be heated when the sun is lower in winter and prevent the rays of the sun from affecting the inside of the house when it is higher in summer. The ends of the eaves also incorporate wooden blinds that regulate the incursion of sunlight in the intermediate seasons and control the glare.
The house has both sash and awning windows with integrated mosquito netting and insulated glazing with argon gas and solar control. These are placed in such a way that all the spaces have cross-ventilation. On summer nights a roof lantern over the octagonal space housing the staircase is opened to produce an updraft, which results in natural night cooling that replenishes and refreshes the air inside the house. There is geothermal under-floor heating beneath the ceramic tiles, custom made by Cerámica Cumella. Their colour was chosen to be dark enough to absorb the solar energy and light enough to avoid people’s footprints being visible. The central patio is paved with sandstone flagstones of the same size as the indoor ceramic floor tiles. Rainwater runoff from the green roof is collected in a 15,000-litre cistern for watering the garden.The house obtained the Class A energy rating with an annual energy consumption of 29 kWh/m2 and emissions of 7 kg of CO2/m2 a year.
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