GG-15 House
The project is a two storey private residence of 150m2, located in a rectangular-shaped lot of with 440m2, on an old neighborhood of Mérida, which is in early stages of urban regeneration. The house was designed for a retired couple of foreigners looking for living much simpler in Mexico.
The ground floor contains a kitchen and dining spaces, a double-height living room, a guest room with a bathroom and a covered terrace open to the garden. The service areas include a laundry room, a storage space and a garage. The first level is comprised by a study room, a linen closet, and the master bedroom with a bathroom with a walk-in closet, and a covered terrace above the one previously mentioned.
The backyard garden is one of the main design elements of the project. The existent trees of considerable size were left intact and later incorporated into the arrangement of the house. The terraces on ground and first level serve as a veranda space which reduce and regulates solar and heat gain for the interior spaces, and their shape wraps a 60-year-old oak, reassuring their function as link between interior and exterior.
The floorplan has a wedge-like shape which is a result of the need of opening spaces towards interior patios and favorable orientation, allowing each space to have cross ventilation, reducing the need for air conditioning.
The material palette is deliberately constrained in order reduce to a minimum the number of construction detailing and to let the spatial quality of the architecture enrich the experience of living. Some of the finishes include cement tile flooring, produced locally, and tropical wood decking for the exterior terraces and the staircase. All the windows use aluminum with a black matte finish, likewise all the steel structures with bamboo panels are painted in the same finish.
All of the interior and exterior finish of the house is plastered with stucco with a natural resin obtained from an endemic tree, Chukum, which was traditionally used to waterproof water tanks and canals in the colonial epoch and later. This technique was rediscovered in 1996 by the studio and it remains as an important cultural and architectural legacy for the region.
