Casa Osa
Casa Osa is a vacation home for an American doctor and his family on the Osa Peninsula on the Pacific Ocean coast of Costa Rica. The house occupies the small plot of a former mango farm on top of a hill to avoid any intervention in the virgin forest surrounding it.
Stretching from entry of the property at the top of the hill down to the very edge of the bush at the bottom, the house orients itself following the topography and directing the rooms to chosen distant views.
The rooms of the house are open to the elements and separated from each other to increase the surface of contact between interior and exterior and take maximum advantage of the pleasant weather. They are connected by covered walkways that define two walled gardens as they descend the hill to the forest.
These gardens are delimited by low walls on their open sides and provide transition between the house and the forest. In the evenings, time can be safely spent outdoor in these gardens while deadly snakes come out of the forest and roam freely about the side of the hill.
Located in an extremely distant and isolated place, the house is built using locally available materials. The walls are reinforced concrete and load-bearing concrete block masonry and are rendered in stucco painted white. The structure of the roof is made of steel beams and specially designed to span the distances between the different rooms of the house. The roof is corrugated aluminum with a ceiling of local teak wood harvested from trees fallen by natural causes.
