The Ombra house is a patio house: a house inscribed within an almost perfect cube. It is a white excavated cube whose mass has been subtracted to allow its inhabitation. Terraces, visual frames, windows, and a central courtyard in double-height form the palette of drilling strategies that transgress the purity of its geometry.

Located in the municipality of San Pedro Garza Garcia, in the metropolitan area of Monterrey, the house is set around a central courtyard that acts as an extension of the interior spaces. It is a pergolated patio, to mitigate the high solar incidence prevalent in this area of northern Mexico but also to contain the space and provide it with a porous limit that allows us to feel protected in an interior-exterior space.

Picking up the medieval European tradition, the main floor of the house is one level above the street level; that gives it greater thermal comfort but above all it gives a great privacy and allows to have big openings without being observed from street level. On this main floor all the public uses of the house are located: living room, dining room, kitchen, breakfast room and TV room. They are organized around the central courtyard: an ope space that helps to build a continuum between the rooms and the pool that is contained between the walls of the courtyard, and open to the adjacent garden.

The upper floor is reserved for the private uses of the house. 3 rooms and a studio open through large terraces and windows to the stunning views of the Sierra Madre of Monterrey. The ground floor contains a cinema, playground and service areas. Despite such an elementary programmatic organisation in the different floors of the house, spatial reading is organised through a unique vertical hole, building an intricate cross-view space that makes the void the real protagonist of the project. The House was made for the SorteosTEC lottery. It will be drawn and all the benefits obtained will go to scholarships for low-income students.