Single Family Home, New Construction, Artemisa, 2017
On a cliff west of Havana is this house surrounded by the sea. Despite having a large program size required, we had an intuition that the house should use itself to hide in the landscape.
The new house had to maintain the characteristics of the existing house, which were its perimeter of 14 x 14m, gabled roof and portal on all four sides.
As it is a weekend house with amazing views, it had to be completely open to the landscape to take advantage of its position, and have the possibility of being completely closed once back in the city.
For this we had 2 clear references: some cabins in Soroa where the roof is at the same time the room, while everything else opens up; and the country houses used to dry tobacco, where palm wood covers everything
While the ground floor concentrates all the public areas of the House being an open space, the main room is hidden in the roof and the guest rooms and the garage are hidden underground illuminated by a long and narrow patio.
In this way we achieved a sheltered house made of palm wood with its original shape, which hides a larger one made of glass and reinforced concrete.
From the outside it still looks like a single level house, as it is covered by palm boards.
Designed by Anadis González, Fernando Martirena, Gerardo Guillén and David Medina.
