simplicity love: Four Seasons House, Spain | Churtichaga + Quadra-Salcedo

Madrid based architects Josemaria de Churtichaga and Cayetana de la Quadra-Salcedo designed a minimalist weekend refuge for themselves, located in Berrocal, Segovia, Castilla y León, north of Madrid.

The retreat stands out in the rural landscape with its simple, wooden structure, projecting east-west terraces and yellow-colored details. The interior is also timber-lined, featuring built-in desks and cupboards.

Photography © Fernando Guerra | FG+SG Fotografia de arquitectura

Description from Churtichaga + Quadra-Salcedo:

Four Seasons House

This is a humanised landscape of meadows, walls, ash, streams, a small-scale landscape, minimal, almost domestic, and where absolutely everything happens in yellow.

In spring poke all yellow flowers. In the summer, yellow cereal is yellow harvested in a yellow Castilian heat. Fall only comes here in yellow, millions of tiny ash leaves that die in a lingering and dry yellow. In winter, yellow insists in glowing flashes of yellow lichen on the gray trunks of ash trees. And here every machine is yellow, the signs are yellow, everywhere yellows...

We bought a meadow in this landscape 15 years ago, and after 12 years of yellow contemplation, we decided to build a tiny house there, a refuge, a piece of landscape as a frame, a small inhabited threshold with two views, east and west.

To the west, a nearby view of rocks, moss, brambles and ancient ash. And to the east, the distant dawn over the yellow mountains.
This double view and the thinking body finished to draw the house. Everything is small, everything is short, everything has a tiny scale. From outside, the view slides over the house.

The eye only stops at a yellow gate guarding the doorway, and a yellow chimney that warms it, the rest is invisible. And when sitting, stopping in the doorway, the house disappears and the world continues in yellow.