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Architects: herchell arquitectos
- Area: 715 m²
- Year: 2022
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Photographs:Lorena Darquea Schettini
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Lead Architect: Miguel Hernandez Michel
Text description provided by the architects. This project seeks to question the standards of life and the way in which user lives and inhabits their spaces on a daily basis. Casa Patio seeks to separate the space from daily life in the city and invite the user to live an experience, an escape into the unknown, a refuge where the steel columns shelter those exterior corridors embraced by central patios which they asked nature for permission to coexist with her in the same harmony.
The first approach to the place, is located in a magical town in Mexico, San Sebastián del Oeste. A town which, as the word says, is magical, surrounded by its colonial houses, its facades and the same colors in shades of red and white, stone streets, and quarry sidewalks. In this magical town, there is an order and harmony that is difficult to find. Surrounded by forests and mountains, San Sebastián del Oeste is a town in the mountains 1 hour from Puerto Vallarta on the highway that is home to all kinds of flora from pines to ferns, as well as parotas and avocados. This route is one of the most beautiful in Mexico since you start on the beach and seas and end in the forest and mountains.
In this way, the lot was found with two large avocado trees over 20 m high, which gave us the inspiration to surround these trees, adapt ourselves, and create central patios that can coexist with nature without knocking down those trees.
An H-shaped space was designed in which inspired by the old haciendas of the 17-19th Century left by the Spanish influence, we created a structure adapted to the 21st century. With its central patios, interior corridors, steel columns, exposed beams, windows, and ironwork doors of the bedrooms overlooking the central patios, the house created a hacienda-type style that protects itself from its neighbors and generates a conviviality towards the center of the house without worrying about what surrounds it. This design was developed because the property is located in a condominium with serial lots and little privacy between one and the other.
The house is made up of 4 complete rooms on the ground floor, 5 complete bathrooms, double height living room, kitchen, terrace-dining room, firepit, and laundry area. All this through an H-shaped connected by exterior corridors and stairs that play with the unevenness of the terrain. On the upper floor, a hotel-boutique concept was designed, with an independent entrance, the owner of the house has the facility to rent four bedrooms per night, Airbnb style, at the same time that he inhabits his private space. The rooms on the upper floor for rent are designed to preserve the total privacy of the ground floor, keeping its windows and corridors with a view of the adjoining side. The entrance is through a spiral staircase lined with full sheets of steel which makes the tenant access to the outside of the property.
We use materials from the region, such as brick from clay pits in the area, reeds for the ceilings, and pine wood planted and cut in the same area of Jalisco. The facade shows how the wood had a burning process which is called carbonized wood, in order not to compete with nature. This carbonized wood process used by the Japanese century ago is a very useful technology because it alters the life of the wood up to 50-60 years of installation without any maintenance. The wood is sealed on both sides and burned to create a layer of resistance to the environment such as sun, humidity, and water, among others.
