Marcela House
Marcela House
Erbalunga estudio
ARCHITECTS
Erbalunga estudio
LEAD ARCHITECTS
Arminda Espino, Rubén Rodríguez.
YEAR
2023
LOCATION
Toledo, Spain
CATEGORY
Houses
The rehabilitation of this building is located in a village in Toledo. A place characterized by its low rainfall, low temperatures in winter, and high temperatures in summer.
A place where social life and family life separate at the entrance threshold of each house, and which is of special importance behind closed doors.
The majority of our projects are developed based on a search for light. However, when this project of a courtyard house in Toledo arrived, the development of the project was based on a search for shade, filtered light, and shadow areas.
The house is presented as a set of buildings articulated around a courtyard, following the traditional layout of the place. Each of these buildings offers its inhabitants different possibilities for use and personal fulfillment.
The whole has (a main dwelling, courtyard, porticoed access space, workshop for an artist, guest module, wood-fired kitchen for celebrations, and laundry room).
From the outside, the characteristics of Castilian vernacular architecture are preserved. Thick, poorly perforated walls shape the street boundary and create a barrier to its interior life.
But in the courtyard, these walls are transformed into much more permeable, lightweight skins, endowed with great efficiency, which manage to interweave visual references through the courtyard and between the different rooms.
The courtyard is configured as the social epicenter of the house. In this uncovered interior space, one can stay or access each of the different rooms.
The main element, the dwelling, acts as a backdrop through a permeable ceramic skin, which not only provides privacy but also acts as a solar control element, so important in those latitudes.
In this way, the lighting control of traditional houses is achieved without losing the connection with their private exterior space.
Materials and designs typical of the area have been used in attempting to homogenize the color palette. The use of herringbone brick creates gentle slopes for rainwater drainage, but when dry, it configures a continuous exterior space with the interior, semi-manual ceramic bricks for the new facades, which dialogue with the old facades, ocher-toned ceramic pavements on floors and interior walls, with much softer textures and easier to clean.
