Villafranca House is located very close to Madrid on a large flat rectangular plot surrounded by other single-family homes, all with their garden and enough space around them.
A very monotonous and quiet context, ideal for family life, where most of the buildings are introvert in terms of their relationship with their immediate surroundings. They dialogue only with their own garden and do not look beyond the limits of their plot.
You enter your house by crossing a wall high and dense enough so no one can see you once you cross that domestic border. From your home you do not want to see the street, as if each plot were an oasis to which you can arrive and enjoy your bubble, protecting yourself from the outside world.
After studying the sunlight of the plot, the architects decided to propose a very rational and compact house developed in plan as a large rectangle occupying the entire longitudinal extension of the land, in order to free up space as a garden that accompanies the entire house in its rear part.
The house has 3 levels: basement, ground floor and first floor. The excavated land was used to build this basement, distributing it throughout the place itself, thus avoiding C02 emissions with its transportation and removal, raising the level of the garden and the house on the ground floor.
The ground floor, where daily family life takes place, is completely open and integrated with the rear garden, and at the same time extends its view towards the surrounding trees. A large, round stone “C” gives personality and urban character to the home shape.
It is actually an architectural strategy that seeks to maximize the geometric expressiveness of the extensions of the ground and first floor slabs to create porches and terraces. Intermediate spaces that serve as a transit between the interior and exterior, whose objective is none other than to protect the house from the strong Madrid sun through passive method.
The architects here again decided to make a virtue of necessity, and precisely at that point where the flights of the porches will not be able to protect the interior from the incidence of the hot low sun on summer afternoons, a succession of vertical pieces that hang from the upper slab, project shadows on the façade, like a great veil, a lattice.
A protective space generated while setting the pace and giving that even more stately character if possible to this façade, precisely the one that opens onto the main road of the entire urbanization. Upon entering the house, after crossing the hall, placing yourself in the axis of that porticoes space left by the pilasters, you discover a large space: living room, dining room, library, open kitchen, without a single pillar in the middle completely open to the garden.
A spectacle of spaciousness, light and design, where the architects have worked down to the last detail of its interior design, which becomes an extraordinary and pleasant place when in the afternoon the filtered light from the treetops passes through the pilasters and it seems that everything vibrates, like when you walk among the trees in a forest.
For the home Interior Design, the architects wanted to give continuity to the monumental sculptural character of its exterior architecture, also designing pieces with clear and forceful geometry like the house itself, to highlight those corners that are most important for the family’s daily life, such as the dining room table, the front of the living room where the fireplace and television are, the bathrooms or the bed´s headboards.
Top quality materials have been used, chosen for their plastic qualities and the sensations they transmit, all combined in cream, gray, wood, blue and green tones. Everything is studied to the detail to create a feeling of total comfort and joy: the colors, textures, mixes of materials and furniture, as well as artificial lighting… Living here is daily enjoy of the pleasure of design! Source OOIIO Architecture.
- Location: Villanueva de la Cañada, Madrid, Spain
- Architect: OOIIO Architecture
- Project Team: Joaquín Millán Villamuelas, Federica Aridon Mamolar, Alba Peña Fernández, Jesús Reyes García, Ximena Zenteno Ladrón de Guevara
- Interior Design: OOIIO Architecture
- Civil Engenieer: Emilio Matas Rivero
- Builder: ZEB Construcciones s.l.
- Area: 710 m2
- Year: 2024
- Photographs: Imagen Subliminal, Courtesy of OOIIO Archietcture
