House in Oleiros / Emilio Rodríguez Blanco

Architects: Emilio Rodríguez Blanco
Location: Perillo, Spain
Area: 174.94 m2
Project Year: 2011
Photographs: Ana Amado

Collaborating Architects: Julio Ordax Rodríguez, Antonio Pena Auge

From the architect. A journalist, her partner around age 40 and their son would like to have a 3 bedrooms house, with living room and kitchen. They have a plot near Corunna that were purchased years ago… and very little money. Some 120,000 euros. The plot is small, hard, at the core of Perillo, or what remains of it, squeezing it to the maximum will allow us to build 174m2. We conceive a plan of one floor around 3 courtyards that attempts to maximize the space of the plot, appropriating and using it as a leisure area.

The inclusion of housing in the urban layout is also conditioned by the need to be attached to a small dividing existing home. We transform this uncomfortable situation into an opportunity and are in contact with the adjacent building where architecture and space acquire a unique status that meets regulatory requirements and at the same time, it becomes an event and mineral landscape.

The ground floor appears open and fluid. Spaces are merged without imposing uses. We have not used any interior woodwork, but have resolved the specific need of privacy by using curtains. The outside of the plot blurs its boundary penetrating into the house. The upstairs retains its relationship with the environment, open to the views. Dividing space becomes domestic alpine scenery, a terrace, solarium, point of observation and relationship with the neighborhood.

The architecture is understood as a container waiting to be filled, without rules, in which the everyday anger suggesting ways to inhabit, avoiding where possible the dictatorship of furniture and design. The materials are the most accessible and affordable, without anything that is not part of any local store inventory of usual construction avoiding unnecessary transport. On a structure of walls and concrete slabs resolved, to the domestic space of the courtyards, a ventilated façade of local untreated pine using the same concept outside, that time with black panels of corrugated fiber cement.

In the interior concrete is exposed as a memory of the performed work, the gray resin floor without joints reaffirms the continuity of space. The roof has inverted flat gravel. The use of energy-efficient systems, orientation, cross ventilation and natural lighting conditions, supplemented with other strategies of harnessing clean energy by using solar panels, heat pump, high thermal inertia enclosures, floor heating system, low emissivity carpentry and appropriate thermal efficiency were also key issues for this project.