Esten House / Estudio Tecla

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Text description provided by the architects.Casa Esten was originally the shed of an old country house in Buenos Aires. The project arose from the need to convert it into a weekend house or for temporary rental.The main decision in the renovation was the relocalization of the gallery: the new project allows the house to open towards the north with the forest, achieving constant contact with nature for the user. The gallery’s morphology replicates the original volume of the shed with a gabled roof. Therefore, the house is perceived as a duo of mirrored volumes: one of them full and the other empty.The interior public sector of the house consists of a living room and dining room with an integrated kitchen with cross ventilation to ventilate and walls with an air chamber to insulate from cold and heat. The private sector consists of two bedrooms with views of the park.The proportion of inside – outside in the floor plan is equal: the intention is that the user spends most of the time in the gallery, sharing and enjoying nature.The original construction had a gallery with glass enclosures that it was decided to reuse. From these recovered windows, the new gallery and facade of the house were modulated. Consequently, the image is composed of a succession of modules with different levels of opacity according to their function: some blind materialized in sheet metal provide privacy, others semi-transparent materialized in polycarbonate let light pass but protect from rain, and others completely permeable, dematerialized, allow to be crossed. From one of the permeable modules, a path leads to the forest that precedes the house, delimiting isolated spaces between the trees and ending in the pool.