House in Front of a Stream

The house answers to the needs of its owner who has incapacity, and uses a wheelchair, he is elderly person and he wanted practical small, comfortable and pleasant house. The plot has a trapezoidal shape, facing the street at north side, one public square at east, one small river in the south side, and one neighbour in the west. The house takes benefit of its interesting relation with the surroundings, but has to provide also privacy.

The whole house is in developed in the ground floor level, and is defined by two volumes that are adapted to the irregular shape of the plot, one of them is parallel to neighbour limit, and the other one is perpendicular to the street, being a little turned respect the other one, defining between them a protected space, sunny, saved from the vision from the public spaces, and open to the green plants of the stream. The non-parallel position between this two volumes benefits to get those aims. And the space defined between them will become an extension of the interior spaces, being another exterior room with sun, but also with a small porch with the green background of the plants of the river.
Recessing the rails of the sliding doors into the floor we allow an easy circulation with the wheelchair from the interior to the exterior.

The budget was low, and the house had to be built as much we can by masonry by the builder chosen by the client, meaning we had used the most simple, basic and easy constructive systems, but used with coherence in the way that they provide its maximum performances. The house was built from the interior to the exterior with successive layers, first the structural brick wall that it’s seen as an interior finishing, then the isolation then an empty space that allows hiding the sliding windows, and at the end another thin wall rendered with lime mortar.

The small house takes the maximum benefits of the characteristics of the place, using the low resources available to provide pleasant and practical spaces to the specific needs of the owners.

05AM Arquitectura
Carme Muñoz & Joan Arnau

Collaborators: Carles Planas, Júlia Esteve, Marta Lloret
Structure: David Codinach
Systems: Albert Colomer
Builder: Albert Puigmolé