Casa Loma / Besonias Almeida Arquitectos

+27

Description submitted by the project team. Casa Loma is located in Costa Esmeralda, a private development on the dunes of the Buenos Aires coast, 390 km from Buenos Aires and just 13 km north of Pinamar. It is an urban complex of great landscape value in which native grasslands coexist with a young forestation of acacias and maritime pines and which preserves some sectors of consolidated forest.

The land, 22m wide and 50m deep, has a young grove of maritime pines and is part of a dune that rises abruptly up to 4m above street level in the first 6m of retreat, maintaining that difference also with one of the neighboring lots. This particularity, although it makes access difficult, provides sufficient privacy without the need for extra resources in relation to the public space and one of the neighboring properties.

The order consisted of a summer house entirely built in exposed concrete, this order also including a considerable part of its equipment. The clients leave to the discretion of the studio the possibility of breaking with this extreme uniformity by using some other material that can be expressed in contrast both in color and texture with the concrete, clarifying that this choice is made considering zero maintenance.

The program had to include an en-suite bedroom with its own storage space for the couple and two bedrooms with a shared bathroom for the children with the capacity to receive friends. The social area had to be the main space of the house and the one that established the most fluid relationship with the forest and with the different outdoor activities required to live it intensely. They also requested an enclosed space for storing beach vehicles and an open-air space for vehicles.

To respond to the situation created by the significant unevenness between the lot and its surroundings, without making modifications to its topography and respecting all the existing trees, it was proposed to resolve the house by establishing a pedestrian route that would take advantage of certain conditions in principle. adverse. The journey begins at the foot of a comfortable staircase with five landings, which runs almost the entire sloping side with the lowest bordering lot. At the end of the ascent and through a portal you enter a patio. A space that is insinuated sifted by a series of quebracho boards in a vertical position, while climbing the staircase. An organizing space for the entire house that, protected from the eyes of neighbors, provides intimacy and expansion to the most important rooms of the house.

In one corner of the patio, and barely hinted at by an eave, is the entrance door to the social area with all integrated uses (living room, dining room, kitchen) and determined according to the type of concrete equipment proposed. Turning, and through a corridor visually integrated with the patio, you enter the secondary bedrooms and the general bathroom. At the end of the path, announced by a light entrance, you access the master bedroom with views of the street through a low horizontal opening along the entire length of the suite. Finally, and through a large window we can go out to the patio and start the tour again. In addition to access via the stairs, another secondary access has been planned with quebracho boards on the natural terrain to be able to directly enter the area of ​​outdoor activities under the trees.

Having defined the way to climb the dune to enter the house and the distribution of the rooms to avoid all the trees, it remained to be resolved how to make an access to the house so far from this road evident from the street. It was then decided to produce a break in the formal rigor of the volumetry for the purposes of announcing this entry. This is achieved by breaking the orthogonality of the plan with a slight turn of the layout of the stairs and the side of the patio. In this way, part of the prism that encloses the social activities becomes visible and, in the same operation with the dragging of part of the lateral partition, a volumetric distortion is generated that is very visible from the street.