There’s a Stone in the Middle of the House | Casa Piedra Acapulco

ByMyProperty Life

Stone House (Casa Piedra Acapulco) is located in Brisas Marqués, a residential neighborhood on a peninsula between the traditional Acapulco Bay and Puerto Marqués Bay in the state of Guerrero. The essential characteristic of this complex is that it is located in a deposit of granite rocks of great antiquity that define the type of soil in the bay. On a 1000-square-meter site, located 100 meters above sea level and 300 meters from the sea limit, the almost regular and constrained site presented a couple of major challenges to solve.

First of all, to preserve as far as possible the rocky spirit found, an immense sea of stones, particularly two enormous pieces of more than two meters in diameter in the center of the terrain. The second, dilute the scale of the house in the topography with more than 17 meters of difference in level from the lowest point; looking for the equilibrium point where the sea appeared, the wind flowed and the existing rock at the heart of the project slipped under the portico-house to blur the boundaries between the natural terrain and human interventions.

Read another article:Design Trends for Creating a Vacation Vibe at Home

The big challenge was to scale in sight the size of the house, by solving a simple scheme where the ¨plaza¨ unfolds from the stony ground and a simple portico houses at its highest level the four rooms of the intimate program to almost settle on the central stone, and then slide into the topography.

The complexity of the house is not found in the simple regular scheme, but in the encounters with the nature of the stones, the trees and the existing topography. The target was to create completely open social areas with only a few closed elements such as the main kitchen and the television room but always seeing and honoring the rocks.

Reduce the architecture to a minimum to find in the frames and infinite horizons of the pool, the sea and the jungle the spatial construction of the spaces. A house that has no front or rear, but opens to various landscapes with the same hierarchy; finding in the different levels the opportunity to house the service areas, cisterns, warehouses and a small independent department; creating terraces and rest areas with different opportunities for views and sunning in close dialogue with nature. The staircase is an axis that runs through all levels, from the parking lot to the rooms floor, in a straight line, sometimes contained between walls and others in tension with the rock and the spaces.

Read another article:Hot Trends: 20 Best Farmhouse Style Kitchens in White and Wood

Credits:

Project title: Casa Piedra Acapulco (Stone House Acapulco)
Location: Acapulco De Juárez, Mexico
Architects: Taller Gabriela Carrillo
Area: 700 m²
Year: 2020
Photographs: Rafael Gamo

0:00 – Casa Piedra Acapulco
7:17 – Drawings

Similar Posts

  • VITR

    This renovation project originates from the intervention of a pre-existent building located in the western area of Mexico City; reshaping it into a studio-house project, with clear conditions and an eye set into the pre-existing circumstances. Our design solution takes on a residential structure from the 20th century and recycles it into a project that integrates itself with its immediate natural environment, shattering the hegemony of the high walls behind which the neighboring houses hide, in order to establish a dialogue that transcends the physical limitations of the project. The variations in the depths of different planes, offer the environment a living façade, where the interior activities are guessed from the visual filters that concede intimacy to the interior spaces. The interior-exterior duality brakes its context’s routine, offering a canvas of textures where the concrete and granite give away to the mildness of the metal and the lightness of plastic fabrics. To the exterior, the housing peeks out without invading; whilst opening in the interior, subtlety exposing itself, balancing the volumes that are inserted in the site. An interplay of planes occurs inside allowing the versatility of spaces by the movement of long-distance sliding screens and wainscots formed by timber that contrast in warmth and complexity with the sobriety of the stone coatings and apparent concrete of the enclosures. A new stairway, based on steel strips, reactivates the space where the old one stood, which gave an opportunity to re-signify the ambiance of the circulations as an experience of sculptural character. The front yard of the house marks the limits of the construction and together with the water mirrors and vegetation orient the route beneath a suspended long cover. The architectural program revolves around the home in the ground floor, leaving the studio in a privileged condition towards the garden. The living spaces in the first level have terraces and views to the exterior between and through a green façade woven of plastic cables (recovering the Acapulco chair technique) that sieve and melt together the thick vegetation of the existing trees. The terraces and windows allows an optimal ventilation, illumination and contextualization between the outside and inside. In the top level, the project offers a view above itself and the wooden horizon from a roof garden that elevates to a higher plane the user’s introspection, belonging and pertinence of itself.