Casa costa
CASA COSTA is a proposal of minimums that achieves maximums. A small but complex space that runs between trees, containing Costa’s particular micro-universe.
In the north of Madrid, next to the A1 highway, CASA COSTA is located on the top floor of an urbanization of the eighties of linear blocks of three floors.
Our challenge was the transformation of a 40 m2 pass-through dwelling, with a terrace and four bedrooms, into a space of undefined limits. To do this we relied on the true protagonist of this site, which are the views that open on both sides of the house. A mass of cedar and tall poplar trees makes it seem as if one is floating among the treetops from the inside.
Costa, the owner of this particular Atalaya, is a visual designer of Dominican descent who works from home in a consulting firm. Like Cosimo, the main character in Italo Calvino’s 1957 novel The Baron Rampant, Costa lives in the heights, surrounded by vegetation and nature, among branches, always in a constant outdoors.
Indeed, it is precisely this condition of permanent exterior that organizes the interior space. One public and one private terrace, facing north and south, respectively, are the limits of the house, and it is organized, in general, through the disposition of a volume in the center of the house. A box that hides in its interior a pass-through bathroom, as well as containing part of the storage of the domestic space in its perimeter, and that generates a double circulation that provides flexibility and permeability to the house, with views and cross ventilation, and the possibility of circular paths.
In this way, CASA COSTA is proposed as a house that rotates around a bathroom. A space within a space where a double objective is achieved: while on the one hand it allows nature and the landscape to pass through the domestic space, on the other hand it seeks to organize it into two distinct areas, according to a private-public vector. The private area, located at the entrance of the house, contains the bedroom. The public, on the other side of the volume, includes a single room, following a strategy that we believe brings dynamism. This space, delimited by a diagonal in the false ceiling, is constituted by a kitchen with a living room linked to a 7m2 terrace that is understood as an extension of the whole.
In contrast to the idea of a compact volume, we have opted for a fragmented, almost deconstructed image of it, with different materials, colors and textures that multiply the number of faces and therefore the number of readings of each of its planes.
The material and finishing system used in both the horizontal and vertical planes reinforces the ideas of continuity, flexibility and exteriority in the house. The pavements are intended to be a continuous element that makes it difficult to detect exactly what is inside and what is outside, the floor-to-ceiling curtains offer the image of a mutable space and the color planes on walls and ceilings with paint define and qualify specific spatial areas of the house.
The space is completed with another system, that of small-scale objects, including a table, two chairs, a sofa, lamps and many small plants that enhance the idea of nature within the domestic space.
CASA COSTA is a proposal of minimums that achieves maximums. A small but complex space that runs between trees, containing Costa’s particular micro-universe. A flexible place where the boundaries between inside and outside, between public and private or between open and closed are blurred and mixed, generating an approximation of what a house of our time should be.
