Guest Pavilion
The Guest Pavilion is a detached extension to a holiday beach house inserted at the backside of a very long and narrow plot facing the Pacific Ocean.
By extracting and reinforcing what was already there, like some dimensions of the existing house and the scale of the trees, we set out not to simply build a new building in the vacant space, but to renovate the entire site, creating a series of gardens in between the two houses.
As a consequence, we built a two story building, using minimum ground occupation and maximum height construction, in order to free as much space as possible in the ground floor and reach to look at the sea above the existing house.
With this architecture we aimed to emphasize the relationship between house and garden, intimate and extrovert, inside and outside spaces.
The exposed skeleton-like structure, based on a continuous 10x20 cm section of steel beams and columns, is placed outside the enclosure layer, thus reinforcing the idea of incompleteness and creating an ambiguity for the borderline between inside and outside.
This mismatch of senses is reinforced in the cross section of the house. A succession of two stairs enfilade, one in the inside and other on the outside, connects both sides of the building, from one garden to the other.
In the ground floor the rooms have very low ceiling height and precise openings. They are slightly fitted below the ground level at the rear façade and at the same level as the outside terrace at the front façade. We tried to create a tactile yet protected relationship with the exterior.
Instead, for the piano nobile at the top floor, we built an open space with very tall height ceiling and fully glazed walls with no corners, so that our eyes observe the exterior view of being surrounded by trees, the distant horizon of the sea and perhaps make us doubt that we are inside.
