The remodeling was born as a post-pandemic self-order, to transform our 50-year-old 1-story house for a way of life that the confinement had modified.
Our main need was to have an important family space where you could work, study and live comfortably on a day-to-day basis, different from the living room and dining room.
The floor plan of the house was arranged in a "T" shape, leaving the bedrooms in a body facing north, and perpendicular to that the living-dining room and kitchen. It was decided to leave the living, dining and kitchen area without alteration because it was remodeled 10 years ago, so we concentrated on the bedroom area.
The criteria was to make the second floor coincide with the structural modules and sanitary installations of the first. Since the south facing site was sold for a real estate project, and everything indicates that the north façade of that project would face our south façade, we decided to design a almost hermetic façade to maintain our privacy. For this reason, it was decided to arrange bathrooms, closets and stairs to the south in an almost blind façade in elevation, and illuminate these spaces from the sky with skylights, which were developed in conjunction with the sustainability study to ensure adequate light without the temperature rise. Towards the north we orient the bedrooms and the office. We find a second floor in the middle of the treetops of the existing garden.
On the first floor, the two children's bedrooms were joined into a single large space that is the family room, and the former master bedroom was transformed into the new children's bedroom.
The space of the old family room was used by the staircase: it was a rather large place for a staircase, and small to be a room, so it was used to make a double-height staircase-library to house books and objects, made with solid boards from Raulí.
Originally the house had a gabled structure with clay tiles, which is one of the characteristics of what is understood as a "Chilean house". It seemed to us that the way to intervene, rather than being by similarity, was by contrast, for which a volume of flat ceiling covered in pre-painted metal plates was worked on.
