simplicity love: 4 Porches + 4 Skylights House, Spain

This vacation house in the Balearic islands, Spain, by Ferran Vizoso Architecture, explores the boundaries between interior and exterior space through the use of 4 porches and 4 skylights.

Placed at irregular angles, these courtyards and skylights penetrate the house mass, fill with light the interiors and frame exterior landscape views.

All Photos © José Hevia

Description by Ferran Vizoso Architecture:

OPEN AND CLOSE
single family house in Port d’Addaia, Menorca

The clients asked for a house close from the outside, but open from the inside. With introverted facades, to maintain the privacy of their adjacent plot, but with generous views towards the totality of its carefully landscaped perimeter. The geometry of four triangular porches solved the paradoxical demand due to the "inverted funnel effect" of their walls. The solution dislocated the geometry of the whole plan and created very rich visual relations in between indoor and outdoor areas. Opening the big sliding doors of the porches, hiding them into the walls, the four triangular outdoor areas connect and the whole house becomes one only great porch. A big shadow in between four intimate "pavilions" (the three bedrooms and the sitting room) with the constant presence of the changing daylight and the garden views. This intense relation in between interior and exterior was also brought into the bathrooms, where three triangular skylights lit the interior rooms functioning as sun light kaleidoscopes. The residence is a comfortable and protected “interior” (almost exterior) not "in front of" or "by" nature, but absolutely surrounded by it.