Chão das Giestas House by AVA Architects

Lisbon-based studio AVA Architects has designed the Chão das Giestas House.

Completed in 2006, this two story contemporary home is located in São Miguel da Guarda, Portugal.

Chão das Giestas House by AVA Architects:

“Context

The house evolves planimetricly with the city of Guarda as a background. The place profoundly altered exists in a peripheral context recently urbanized. The natural territory was depersonalized by the topographic changes caused by the urbanization. The existing public space is build without an organisation that matches the topography of the place, forcing an artificial and uncharacteristic lotting where there are different morphologic construction formulations e several typologies.

Lot

Corner lot of trapezoidal configuration. Streets layout involving the lot with high sloping. Good solar exposure. Restrictions in the implantation of the building volume initially predicted.

Program

The program evolves in three floors, imposed by the rules of the lotting. The garage, support kitchen, store-room, and service toilet are organised in the ground floor and in function of the external space previously defined.

On the 0 floor, common spaces were formed around the central entry space (it unites and divides the two compact bodies). This entrance space makes the functional and visual link between all the construction levels. In these two bodies are included the kitchen, living-room, dining-room, work space and service toilet. It ́s in this floor that are placed the common spaces, relating from the entry space where the stairs are inserted. The stairs where conceived as a sculpture, beyond their utilitarian function. We tried to establish a logic visual relation between the exterior and the interior and vice-versa an interdependency between the two bodies. In the last floor are the most intimate spaces, the bedrooms and bathrooms, baring in mind their articulations from the central space.

Solution

Foreseen the building of an isolated house with 320m2 of covered area. A garage in the basement and the residence in the two upper floors. Relating to the surrounding landscape. The construction volume is materialized in two apparently compact masses, two bodies that extend the shape of a living space between them. The solution tried to minimize the impact of the predicted building volume of three floors. Lot delimitated by a level wall. The setting favours visual stringing between the back and front parts of the site. The visual permeability between the inside and the outside, the public and the private is controlled and guided.”