This house is located on a wooded hill on the outskirts of Medellín. With a built area of 327.5m² (3525.18 sq. Ft.) it was designed for a young couple with three small children, who wanted a one-story house hidden among the trees, where the mother could have an art studio as well as exhibition spaces for her paintings. The family also needed a flat outside area for gardening.
The house was placed on the edge of the lot where the levelled area meets the slope, in order to free up land for the garden and for the rooms to be closer to the surrounding trees. The geometry of the house responds to three specific conditions of the site: the land grading, the native forest on the north side and the view over the mountains of the region from the east side of the plot. Thus, the project was configured as a Y-shaped volume that occupies the space where these three conditions converge. The program is distributed in three branches. The first one, with its long sides facing east and west, contains the living room, dining room, the kitchen, a parking space and other service areas. From here, the living room is open to the view and the garden and terrace at the same time on opposite sides. The second branch is aligned with the trees and comprises the art studio and the children’s rooms. The third one is located between the forest and the open view; it contains the master bedroom, which has a balcony next to one of the trees that acts as a green curtain. The architecture of the house brings out these three moments of the site and entails a domestic life amidst the shade of the trees, the garden and the distant landscape; where the inside is connected to the outside garden and forest. The center of the plan with the living room, is where the three branches meet.
The access to the house was designed as a promenade that begins in the parking space, where you can enjoy the view and then enter through the garden. Having located the terrace in the lawn and not towards the view, as is usually done, configures a habitable outdoor patio between the mountain and the angled facades of the house, with glass doors that open completely. This place becomes a private outdoor extension of the living room.
The project´s section was defined by ceiling at a height of 2.50 meters (8.20 ft) that goes up diagonally to 4.00 meters (13.12 ft) in the bedrooms and living room, where horizontal high-level windows frame the tree tops and allow sunlight to get in during the day in order to raise the temperature at night. For the same purpose, the facades where painted graphite gray and an asphalt roll membrane with the same color was used for the roof, which makes the volume be perceived as a unified mass, where the walls and the roof materials look the same.
The white and gray interior walls serve as a neutral background for the colorful works of art made by the mother, while the circulation areas were increased so that the corridors function as exhibition spaces. Architecture becomes a backdrop that supports the paintings and interventions made on it. The house is both an art gallery and a three-dimensional canvas.
The project was built using a confined masonry structural system, with concrete columns and beams cast in brick partitions. These walls were covered with cement plaster and then painted. The roof structure was constructed with steel hollow section tubes supporting fiber cement panels covered with a waterproof roll roofing. This building method allowed a simple, artisanal and low-cost construction.
This house promotes a suburban way of dwelling adapted to the tropical montane forest where it is located, turned inward and outward simultaneously. Its spatiality seeks sunlight and offers surfaces for art, while its geometry follows the vegetation and the view in order to create an outside extension of the domestic space. Built at the points of convergence between different landscapes, its architecture blends them and links them together.
