Casa en Santiago

Ana Cecilia Garza

• Architects

La Villa de Santiago is a colonial town located 37 kilometers from the city of Monterrey. Every week a large number of visitors come to enjoy the different natural scenarios held in this part of the Sierra Madre Oriental. Rivers, waterfalls and forests are a perfect place to practice canyoning, climbing and trekking. Traditionally many weekend residences and cottages are located here. That is the case of this house, placed in a terrain with view to the nearby mountains on the outskirts of the town.

photo_credit Ana Cecilia Garza — Ana Cecilia Garza

From the outside, the house have a closed façade where only the doors stand out. Built with local stone it pass unnoticed, giving continuity to the rural built language of the site as large walls of stone and adobe still remain from past centuries. On the inside, the house opens up to the available space through different transparencies and patios, generating articulated and open spaces. The program is divided in two by a nucleus of service that works like an axis between public and private areas.

The private area is protected from the street by the large stone wall and from the social by an enclosure of metallic lattice with views to the great central patio. The public is opened and more related to the garden of the house with a covered terrace that extends the public use to the exterior. The terrace gives a great shade area perfect to relax that is complemented with a pool and a grill.

The structure is formed by reinforced concrete elements. Walls and carbels have as a finish different results of the explorations in the execution of the material. These elements merge with the floor and the roof also made of concrete. Only one metallic column appears as an inflection point of the rocky monolithic structure in remembrance of its steel interior. Within the structure there are some spaces limited by glass or opened patios that compose the interior-exterior relation of the house. Also, as time passes by, a play of light and shadows starts as it reaches different textures and materials that form the house (lines, grids, plans, stone, wood, steel, ceramics).

The bond of circulation is defined by a spiral staircase and a ramp that reaches the roof terrace from different points of the house. This is the peak moment of experiencing the house because the near mountains are worth time for observation and reflexion. This event creates an unceasing movement between interior and exterior, between house and landscape, between user and the surrounding.