A family wanted to build a special house on a plot with a significant slope west oriented, facing a wide plain full of oaks at the foot of Madrid Mountains.
The location is great, because from there you can see incredible sunsets, with the domes of El Escorial Monastery and the mountains on its background.
On the plot itself there were already several oak trees and very hard granite rocks emerging from the ground, a very typical landscape of this area. In fact, an old wall made of this same granite material closes the plot in its lower side. A stone barrier that is probably centuries old and will be a great opportunity to recover and integrate it as the exterior fencing of the new house.
Without a doubt, a plot in which you want to work, because it is full of starting stimuli. It is not an uninteresting blank canvas on which anything can happen. No, here there are already interesting elements from which to start the project.
The family with two children was looking for a private house adapted to their creative and homely way of life, including spaces to play music, draw, dance, cook together... At the same time they were looking for a very energy efficient building, with almost zero consumption, comfortable and functional, where everything can easily stored and organized.
To create a special and personal house, the architects proposed a set of prismatic volumes stacked on top of each other. Different and irregular elements, buth together they make up the home.
They seem like containers presiding over the hillside open to the landscape and the horizon from one side and to the back of the plot, the garden, from other side. A formal game that simultaneously organizes the program of the house since each drawer contains a specific use: one piece houses the kitchen, another the bedrooms, the upper piece the library and study area and the open space between all of them is for the living room and seating area.
The house is located at the correct point on the plot to optimize the views, get a comfortable access and good use of the garden, carefully studying the slope to obtain a basement to store the cars. Also, the architects studied the position of the plot trees to create outdoor nice environments so the life does not only happen inside the house.
Responding to the client´s low energy consumption requirements, the architects equipped the home with two types of very efficient envelopes. The front and rear facades are resolved with "carriage green" metal pieces (color that comes from local traditional architecture´s windows and blinds), arranged in such a way that they create a natural self-ventilated chamber, without the need for any energy input, thus controlling the incidence of the strong Madrid sun on the most exposed facades.
On the contrary, the side facades and roofs are covered with exterior thermal insulation systems, in this case without the need to create a self-ventilated facade, because the trees on the plot themselves cast shade on these panels, this being more protected. These are finished in white, which deliberately contrast with the "carriage green" color, enhancing the formal gesture that defines the house: boxes stacked on a hillside, ballanced on top of each other, creating an altarpiece, a residential front full of personality that will become the symbol of a family determined in just not living conventionally in any house.
