ENROQUE HOUSE
SINGLE-FAMILY HOUSE
Client: Private Date: 2012 Categories: Single Family House, Integral Remodeling
ASCER AWARD 2014 (Honorable Mention Architecture)
COACV 2013-2014 (Architecture and Restoration Award. COACV Awards Act)
This small house, with three facades, 4 x 6.70 meters in plan, is nestled between narrow stairs, in El Barrio Antiguo, on the slopes of the Benacantil in Alicante.
This project arises from Inmaculada’s desire to have a new home, close to her work, that meets her current needs, and that even allows, on the first floor, to project a mini apartment with autonomy with respect to the house above, in case one of her children wants to visit her.
The project is conceived as a rehabilitation and extension of the existing house, which was practically in ruins.
Inside, the new structure, made of HEB beams and a composite sheet metal slab, is unclad and honest, as are the handrails and staircase made of galvanized sheet metal and tubular metal profiles.
The few partitions that are projected are made of glass, 16mm thick, and the finish of floors and wet rooms are a continuum of microcement.
On the first floor, every nook and cranny is studied to finally resolve a kitchen, bathroom, closet, bedroom and living-dining room, with an obligatory spatial continuity due to the reduced space.
The second floor is the day area of Inmaculada’s house: kitchen-dining-living room, which has as its centerpiece the staircase, which develops as a sequence of permeable, metallic steps, intertwined around a series of steel cables, in the form of a harp, which act as a railing.
On the second floor is distributed the master bedroom-study-dressing room-bathroom.
On the facade, the perforations are strategically distributed to, depending on the case, illuminate the desk, support the sofa area with natural light, intimately illuminate the bathroom area or, in the case of the roof tower, function as a large main skylight that permeates with light, degrading in height, almost the entire house. All these strategically designed façade openings function as cross ventilation, hygienic and revitalizing, circulating the air between its north and south facades.
Towards the street, the premise of this series of openings is to gain, through rips and flares, different situations such as reaching the first rays of sunlight from the east, to have a view towards the entrance to San Roque street, or to avoid window sills where to lean and perch on the façade openings, with a protective purpose. Here the openings build the oblique look, the facade is modeled to be able to decongest the physical and constrained situation imposed by its urban configuration.
Finally, and most importantly, this facade, and its openings, in contact with the public space is protected by a stamped tile veneer, which accompanies us and steps as we climb the stairs of San Roque Street, side facade and finally Navios Street.
The tile covers the plinth of the house, climbs up the facade and enters its openings, jambing them, adapting with geometric perfection to the series of flared planes that make up its elevations.
This tiled plinth and the formal image of the continuum of holes drilled in the facade massif, protected by permeable stretched sheet metal trellises, gives it a mediating image between the tradition of the place and the decidedly contemporary vocation of the El Enroque house and its owner, Inmaculada.
Co-Authors: María José Antón Lozano Location: Alicante Photography: CabreraPhoto, Rocamora Diseño y Arquitectura
