Casa Máxima, The Rururban House | 2019

Galician rururban landscape fills every corner around Casa Máxima. There are corn crops across the street, but a little bit further you can see piles of cars that are going to be smashed into small boxes in a car scrapping. The house is situated in a very diffuse limit between the city and old agricultural spaces. Slowly developing as an expansion area for familiar houses the plot of land was also very irregular, due to the old tradition of “minifundio” which in Galicia consisted in splitting the agricultural land between all the sons and daughters of a marriage.
This particular proceeding resulted in the very small and unusual shapes of the plots of land in this rururban area. The project needed from the beginning to accommodate this magical geometric reality. One of the first desires of the project promoter was to have a house with no stairs, so the program had to fit into just one-floor plan. The thin plot was structured around some small volumes that connect with each other and separate the different uses of the house. Instead of doing a strategy of open plan, the architects decided to do the opposite and make the house function more like a comic. Each room is a story in itself, being a sequence of different panels. Each room or volume has its own communication with the sky, so the light changes every room through the day but also differences the spaces by the light and shadows.
Every volume, has its own visual and physical opening to the garden, so from any one of the rooms one has the feeling of being a little bit outside, the use of the continuum element of the grey flooring, intensifies this effect, so the limits between outside‐inside blurs. A hydrangea garden surrounds the entire house and becomes the bubble limit of the plot of land to separate from neighbors.
This plant, originally from Asia, developed well in Galicia since it prefers soils with acidity. Due to this, it became one of the most important plants in Galician pazos (manor houses). The design of the surrounding garden includes a perimetral path which is drawn above the grass using grey granite, sketching curves, and diagonals that create three different exterior spaces. First, there is the rounded square of the kitchen, secondly, the rectangular square of the living room and pool, and finally, the interior square, a quiet and private space close to the bedrooms. The northern end is the entry for cars and people. A big space for three cars was also added to the floor plan, so no excavation had to be done, in order to save resources. In the future, this big room can easily be added to the house, serving as an office, or an atelier. In the first approaches to the design, the entire house would have the same materiality on the outside, but later, it was decided to make a clear difference between heaviness and lightness. Exterior walls are made with Galician grey granite stone, that links the weight of the house to the earth and speaks about horizontality, with its, and the cinq surfaces of the roofs, that connect with the sky and the sunlight. Inside, the materiality instead, links ceilings with walls, and just breaks by the use of grey flooring, to emphasize the difference between volumes and their pure form. It was decided to make the kitchen the meeting space for the house, a space with a big centered table with the ceramic hob, with an opening to the sky just above, that works as a scenario for cooking with friends, having meetings, or doing DIY activities. The centered table came from an old cedar the owner of the house had, so it is a way to remember the origin of the furniture. The three bedrooms have a distribution, that allows separating four different areas inside of it, by the use of a box of furniture, close to the door, it easily separates the area for entrance gives privacy to the room, an area for clothes storage, another for a room office and finally a big area with the bed facing the garden and the hydrangeas. A similar scheme was used in the interstitial space of the entrance of the house.
Thanks to a wardrobe that stays in the middle of it, two different spaces are created, one as a smaller welcoming area, and another that works as a private space to read with a visual connection with the interior square. Each volume is a different frustum or portion of a pyramid. The frustums have their skylights centering different elements, so in the kitchen, the skylight is in the middle and is long, enough to give importance to the table, but in the rooms, the skylight is over the bed and square shaped, so configures a very different kind of roofs that disaggregates the house, into a small landscape of smaller houses inside of a big house. By connecting different volumes, a bigger one is created. Since the house had to occupy most of the surface of the plot of land, it was decided to look like a rururban town inside of the plot of land. A mix of different volumes and shapes that has its own universe in the garden. To protect from the sun and light, some vertical plywood panels were fabricated. The scale and design of them, try to emulate an interior wardrobe, so the scale of the house on the outside gets even smaller and added to the use of cobblestones in the paths, makes the spaces human size.

Location:SpainArchitect: María Teresa Sánchez TáboasArchitecture Office:María Teresa Sánchez TáboasLead Architects:María Teresa Sánchez TáboasAssociate Architects:Josep Ramón Solé, Andrés Suárez Outeda, Petrica ButusinaContractor:Fontexil Construcciones y Promociones S.L.Client: PrivatePhotographer: Andrés Fraga Pérez