ARX

The site is marked by a strong rural character, with its vegetable plots, orchards, paths enclosed by hand-laid dry-stone walls and scattered houses. It is a steep, south-facing hillside overlooking the valley, furrowed by a stream, beyond which rises the mountain that closes off the view.

At the transition between the upper and lower halves of the site, there are two clear landmarks that became the starting point for the project: an irrigation tank and a walnut tree. The first visits to the site almost immediately suggested a volume lying along the slope, set against the approach route, one that would shelter life in the house from the gaze of the surrounding houses and direct the views from the interior over the valley to the south.

The beauty of the site shaped the project, and the house developed an intimate relationship with the ground plane: it buries itself as it rises, becoming itself the ground on which one walks; it lifts off as it descends, projecting out from the slope.

An elongated volume was thus designed, a line folded back on itself and around the tank and the tree that shades it.

Between them, the main outdoor living space took shape. Along the body of the house, patios are "carved out": spaces of intimate calm that the highly exposed site does not otherwise offer, namely the entrance patio, the guest bedroom patio and the corridor patio. The ends of the tubular form branch out and face the exterior in different ways: the end of the master bedroom is narrow and tall, "looking out" over the valley to the east; the wide, flattened end contains the living room and "leans out", suspended over the valley to the south.

The bedroom wing is served by an austere corridor whose ends reveal opposite realities: to the north, it opens onto a patio sunk into the ground, contained and intimate; at the opposite end, it opens onto a landscape of great depth, with the walnut tree in the foreground and the mountain in the distance.