Laxe House / trespes.arquitectos

Laxe House / trespes.arquitectos

+ 27

“Memories are like plants: some of them must be quickly eliminated in order to help the rest develop, transform, flourish.” Marc Augé. Las formas del olvido. Pág. 23. Gedisa. 1998

The main building is set back from the street and it is arranged on two floors. The ground floor is the older one, built more than 150 years ago and presenting 75 cm width stone load-bearing walls. Very altered, this is where the living room and the kitchen can be found. The top floor, where the bedrooms are located, comes from a later intervention. This building is fully adapted to the topography, which results in a 36 cm jump in the middle of the ground floor.

There is a shared space with the adjoining house at the back of the dwelling (the eira). At the end of it, there can be found a storage space (the alpendre).

Lastly, there’s a vegetable garden with a lemon and an orange tree at the foot of the hórreo, evoking its past. It is connected with the main road through a right of way.

The intervention creates and habitable ground floor, composed of the main building’s ground floor, the eira and the alpendre. Accessibility is resolved by the entrance patio, where there can be found quick access through a staircase and a ramp, both of which define a space that can be used for parking.

Clients stated their priorities from the beginning: to preserve and value the existing building. The project adapts to those limits while growing, for the house expands upwards by locating two bedrooms on the first floor and another one in the attic. In order to fit the third bedroom, the bathroom height is reduced to 2.20 m, resulting in bigger volumes of bedrooms.

Vertical movement is resolved by single-flight stairs and on the first floor, there’s a big 5-meter-long desk attached to it. The attic never reaches the facade, letting light through and generating a big connection space through the bedroom’s antechambers. At the end of the path, there is a net, intended for reading while watching the sky through the roof’s perforation.

The alpendre, situated in the backyard, is cleaned and improved by building a wooden lattice facade. The big front is composed of two similar-sized parts: the fixed one, where the access door is located, and the movable one, which runs over the fixed one and opens up the space. Inside it, you can find the celebration space, the laundry room, a bathroom, and storage space.