Pool & outdoor lounge, Spain | Marià Castelló Arquitecte

Formantera based Marià Castelló Arquitecte designed a recreation area with a pool and outdoor space between two rural centenary houses on the island of Formentera, Spain. Tradition meets a contemporary, minimalist design based on clean lines, simplicity and material sincerity. 

Photography © Estudi Es Pujol de s’Era

Description from Marià Castelló Arquitecte:

The project issues from the desire to create a bath and recreation area as core of relationship between the two centenary houses of Can Xomeu Sord, located in the Vénda de Sa Talaissa (La Mola) on the island of Formentera. 

With the objective of the integration on the landscape, the intervention must be rooted in the complex weave of walls and traditional dry stone outbuildings that characterize this type of traditional rural settlements in the smaller of the Pitiüsas. This limitation became an opportunity to formalize a subtle filter between the two houses that offers a close but border meeting area, open to the beautiful view of the lighthouse of La Mola but intimate, that permeates local tradition while echoes the modernity. 

The space bounded by two parallel walls and an old farmyard, set the main guidelines, the precise location and some of the construction details of the intervention. The water sheet of four by fifteen meters searches tangency with the east wall, becoming overflowing over it. The trace of the East wall coincides with the water surface but only dematerialized to leave this footprint of gravels from the same stone as the wall. From that precise limit continues free the natural and heterogeneous topsoil. 

The pool basin, coated of white Macael marble pieces of 60x40x2 cm differentiates a beach-relation area and a swimming area. The entire floor has been solved by a wooden platform of suitably treated solid pine. 

On the South edge, resting on the old farmyard, leans the light pergola of galvanized steel structure and cane covering inspired by the designs of the architect Lluís Clotet at his home in Mallorca and Elías Torres + José Antonio Martínez-Lapeña at Can Toni des Cocons. All this in an order that tends to constructive and material sincerity. 

Source: Archello