Another House of the Neighbourhood / Arnau Estudi d’Arquitectura

Architects: Arnau Estudi d’Arquitectura
Location: Olot, Spain
Architect In Charge: Arnau Vergés Tejero
Area: 132.0 m2
Project Year: 2017
Photographs: Marc Torra

Technical Architect: Josep Maria Codinach Frigola

From the architect. They ask us to extend the house, to live intensely the garden and to dispose of the attainable landscape; Nothing that has not done almost all the neighbours from this cheap houses neighbourhood of the fifties. But in these popular refurbishments, self-construction and simplicity of resources have traditionally outweighed the order, the foresight, or the hand of an architect. We look at the project respecting the values of chance and its diversity of materials and solutions, but also being faithful to rationality; We read the place and propose two extensions and a reform.

The renovation of the existing house is based on the connection of spaces, optimization of circulation and, above all, the recovery of the original structure: an interesting system of a four-point turns supported on the partition walls, always bearing.

The expansion to the north allows a new polyvalent volume that usually acts as a garage on the ground floor and gym at the top. To the east, we extend a building arm like a kitchen / porch that spins the house around the garden. And we understand this external element as the great room of the house, and we conceive the new growth as a strategy to locate the new center of gravity.

The sum of small things close to our clients what can not be paid with money; Nothing that almost all the neighbours of this neighbourhood have not looked for. We built another house in the neighbourhood.