The Riaza House takes off with Angela discontentment with her existing holiday house in Riaza. A house that didn’t comply with her accessibility and comfort requirements now that she is close to retire

The plot where she wanted us to design her new house had a South – East orientation and incredible views to the ski resort of La Pinilla. This house was going to be essentially a house for herself and to enjoy family reunions around the table; This was going to be a house for her retirement days, so it should be distributed in just one floor. On top of this, and due to Riaza´s low winter temperatures and the rising cost of energy, she wishes for a house with a minimum energy consumption and that could easily be heated up because in her previous stone house she had to wait up to 3 days to get if properly warmed up.

With this in mind we laid out a “fence house”, a longitudinal East -West geometry where all the rooms open to La Pinilla views, having the North façade only small illumination and ventilation apertures, locating the access to the house through the sides. This way the house becomes the limit with street, without having to build a wall or fence.
 From the main geometry two volumes rise up tall, the master bedroom and dining room both areas the ones that client gave more importance in the house program.

Due to the urban planning restrictions the maximum floor area that could be built didn’t allowed to enlarge the house, therefor to implement a covered terrace we designed a flying wall that helped us to hide a retractable canopy and resolve the volumetry of the house in a more esthetic way. Additionally, to create a more sheltered feeling inside the house, we decided to bury  it up to the windows sill; simultaneously this decision also made the geometry of the house more horizontal.

The main form and structure of the house was created with prefabricated cross laminated timber, as a way to reduce the thermal inertia of the house (for faster heating), the construction time and the carbon foot print; For a warmer feeling and cost control all the wood inside the house remined uncover.

The façade, roof and floor slab are cover with at least 20cm of EPS thermal insulation to achieve passive house standards; as solar protection, due to the summer high temperature ,and as security, in the south façade all windows are covered with sliding shutters, that are mounted on the façade material´s change.

Material ways we looked for a monolithically project, with 2 clearly differentiated parts: the above and back with the flying volumes and the façade that faces the street, finished in an acrylic mortar filled with pebbles in a light grey color with a vertical texture; and the facades in contact with the more private areas of the house, finished also in an acrylic mortar filled with pebbles but this time with an earth color similar to the traditional architecture of the area.