Design of a house in Santa María de la Alameda, Madrid

Visually dominating the territory: the procedures of architecture to build the landscape.

The positioning in height to visually dominate the territory is an ancestral trait of humanity; for this reason, when good orientation and spectacular views coincide in steep plots of land, it is appropriate to construct buildings that are elevated in their position and shaped as viewpoints for contemplation.

Both procedures, typical of architecture, take advantage of the surroundings to convert the territory into landscape, through the aesthetic appropriation of our gaze.

Located in Santa María de la Alameda, a small village in the northwest of the Community of Madrid, the house we designed is exactly that: a balcony to contemplate the beautiful mountain panorama of the southern slope of the Sierra de Guadarrama and the Cofio River as it passes through.

A house in the mountains that is like living always on vacation.

Initially, this house will be used as a weekend and vacation home. However, over time, it will become the permanent refuge of Nacho and María, who are keen hikers in the mountains of the area, together with their two children.

In order to satisfy their request for the design of a house on a steeply sloping plot with extraordinary views, we decided to take advantage of both conditions so that all the spaces would be able to offer them a hedonistic and joyful experience of the surrounding natural environment inside their future home.

Design strategies to organize the spaces of a small and compact house.

During the first visits to the site, the owners expressed their desire for a small house, consisting of the conventional program for a two-bedroom dwelling, but with the caveat that their children's room should be on an upper level.

To fulfill their wishes and optimize the space to the maximum, we organized the entire program of uses around a spiral staircase, strategically located and crowned by a circular skylight. This element organizes, distributes and establishes four sectors within a single rectangular space, creating a compressed "promenade architecturale", composed of several spatial sequences linked to it.

In addition, the compactness of the floor plan of this house is also due to the specific conditions of the site: located near the highest part of the plot, close to the existing access path, the house is limited to occupy a small portion of available flat land and projects from there over the hillside, by means of a covered porch that extends in cantilever towards the landscape.

Designing the silhouette of a house on the mountain: emulating the territory through the form.

Starting from the strategy of distributing the spaces in rotation, around the staircase, we explored the possibilities of a simple volume, with a decreasing height, whose sloping roof resembles the natural slope of the hillside.

Although not as iconic as the famous Rudin House, this house will be immediately recognizable by its volume, as emphatic as it is simple, identifying the domestic with its silhouette of a sloping roof covered with white flat tiles.

By orienting all the rooms towards the south and turning the view from each of them towards the mountainous landscape, with its characteristic oblique profile towards the slope, the house accommodates spaces of different qualities and scales without losing spatial cohesion. Although compact, it is distinguished by the air it contains under its roof, the gathering around the fireplace, the sense of freedom and escape to the sky on the small upper terrace, the lilting experience involved in using the staircase, and the silence associated with contemplating a beautiful landscape from the comfort of the armchairs on the covered porch, or even lying on the bed.

Material duality: the white house of the warm shelter

Materially, we wanted to exalt the interior-exterior duality through contrast: on the outside, the volume appears uniform and white (even its roof tiles are white), while its interior walls are covered with natural wood planks and paved with ceramic tiles that imitate it, in order to create a snowy house and a warm shelter.

Architecture, nature and place: a paradoxical relationship.

Undoubtedly, architecture always implies artificiality on the territory; however, paradoxically, thanks to it, the experience we can have of nature is enhanced. From the point of view of our discipline, as the philosopher Martin Heidegger masterfully exposed in the conference "Building Inhabiting Thinking", this is because the land precedes the architectural fact, but the place is not a previous datum, but something that comes to life when architecture appears.

Precisely this has been our goal in designing this small mountain house. After all, domestic architecture should provide warmth, shelter, pleasure and build a cozy place.

Do you like this house and have something in mind?

If you want to build a house that is unique and special, contact our architectural firm. We will help you design a custom project that suits your needs and budget.

At HGSE Architects we will be happy to work with you to make your project a reality.