and Alfonso de la Concha Rojas, have designed Casa La Quinta, a blissful sanctuary for a retired couple located in the town of San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato in Mexico.
As is often the case with design, restrictions to the site or the budget can form the basis of an exceptional idea for the final result. This project was limited by the walls of the neighbouring properties, effectively hemming it in and reducing any external space. As the site offered no views of the landscape beyond the architects had to brainstorm an alternative.
They solved this by designing the 350m2 house around three , each designed to have its own character and use. The courtyard with the and hammock, perfect for lazing away the sunny afternoons, makes up the largest of the three. The second offers a gravelled flooring seating area with a single tree. And the third, coming off the master bedroom, is the smallest one of them all.
The design team worked on delivering a house that had no internal boundaries, allowing the social spaces to engage with each other and to flow organically into the external courtyards. The use of oversized glass panels and sliding glass doors make the internal spaces transparent to each other as well as to the outside.
The building is designed around the concept of voids – spaces that project vertically and horizontally. The double-height, open-plan lounge and dining room is potentially the most stunning of this interplay of form.
“These voids give the project its character, producing a different perception of scale to the user, a high contrast of light and shadows, spaces of silence and rest,” explain the architects.
The materials selected also offer an inside/outside connection like the flooring, a common material found on the streets of San Miguel, which flows seamlessly from the interior to the courtyards. The treatment of the neighbouring walls was important too. They applied a traditional stucco finish to all vertical planes, achieving an artisanal look that delivers a sense of timelessness to the building.
Casa La Quinta is an effort of restrained simplicity. Not just because of the application of the internal finishes, the simple white walls or the exposed timber ceilings, but because of the volumes of space that have been created, layered and interplayed between each other.
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