Apfel House
Engaging the challenge of blending with the landscape, in a site with privileged views, Afpel House design was inspired in the old southern barns, taking as reference its volumetry, materiality and horizontality. To focus our objectives on enhancing the most captivating aspect of the land, the house was thought as two horizontal wings that together would find the best possible view of the nature around it; therefore, these two volumes were placed perpendicular to each other on the highest point of the hill.
The main arm is parallel to the horizon, with the Ranco lake in front and the mountain range in the back. Dominated by its transversality, it manages to open itself to both sides of the valley.
It contains a big living room and the kitchen in the middle, where different programs can happens a the same time: having a cope of coffee, reading a book, be next to the fire. Looking for this condition of program multiplicity, in situ furniture were designed, linking the scale of the house as a whole to the interior.
Then on one side, is the main bedroom that connects to a small and more private hill, which has a beautiful viewpoint to the mountain range up north. And on the other side is the garage, a flexible space that also is an art workshop and, in some occasions, is the place where the family can make a big barbecue or parking the car.
The second arm that contains the rest of the bedrooms, is perpendicular to the first one, working as a hinge and giving more personality to the access of the house, allowing it to be in the middle of both volumes, configuring a more contained space, that allows it to be protected of the rain.
The roof has the tallest point where the living room and the kitchen is located, forming an vault inside the center of the house, giving an special quality to common space over the bedrooms. While towards the ends its height decreases, so that from the outside the volume can be read with modesty.
The others facades follow a rhythm of mass and voids, that play a very important role in the composition of the house, varying both, in heights and in types of openings, to determine the character of the interior spaces. As they are circumscribed in metal sheet frames, they take a certain autonomy from the walls of Patagonian oak and are constituted as features that sometimes cross from side to side.
