This house is located in a forest, articulated around the trees, on the ruin of an old rural dwelling. Its form responds to the need for energy self-sufficiency, conditioned by its isolation and its northwest-southeast orientation, situated below the trees with which it forms a single whole, in a relationship on a human scale.
Studio Name: Toni Garcia + Yolanda Somoza arquitectos
Design Team: Toni García and Yolanda Somoza
Area: 302 m2
Year: Project 2018-19
Location: Lugo, Spain
Website: https://www.garcia-somoza.com/house-in-the-forest/
Photography Credits: Toni Garcia and Yolanda Somoza
Building costs: € 453.650
Its inhabitants wanted to live in a house open to the landscape, organised into interconnected rooms on the same level according to the type of relationship that each room establishes with the surrounding forest and meadows. To take advantage of natural light and ventilation, courtyards and a double glazed gallery were opened on the southeast-facing façade, and a chimney is formed in the northwest blind wall, through which air circulates from the ground floor to allow cross-ventilation in winter and retain heat in summer.
The bedroom is oriented to the east through a courtyard connected to the kitchen and with views of the flooded meadow to the northwest, and indirectly through the living room and the swimming pool, creating sequences of different qualities and intensities of light that nuance and degrade the passage from inside to outside, and which throughout the day, and depending on the incidence of the sun, alternately distinguish the rooms and favour the diversity of ambiences.
The living room, dining room and kitchen form a single space in the centre of the house, situated between two courtyards, extending over a terrace with views of the forest through the gallery that lets in the winter sun and protects them from the summer sun, creating shade and ventilation with the cantilevered façade. These spaces, in addition to their bioclimatic potential, are the ones that structure the rest, organising the circulations and establishing more complex relations between them.
The work area, which can be transformed into a guest room and gymnasium, is separated from the living room by a courtyard with an indoor and outdoor swimming pool, connected to the rainwater tank on the ground floor. This courtyard interrupts the continuity of the façade and allows the meadow to enter the house. It is through these interruptions in both façades that the lateral spaces widen visually, provide bioclimatic improvements depending on the season and become transition spaces between inside and outside, patios and rooms at the same time.
Abstract about our practice
Toni Garcia + Yolanda Somoza arquitectos is a firm founded in 2004. Its work focuses on the relationship between housing and the transformation of the territory. It has developed small, medium and large-scale works, from housing rehabilitation to advice on urban regeneration projects and strategic planning of degraded areas, in collaboration with communities, governments and international organisations in Europe and Latin America.
