Cecebre house
In the Galician countryside, building a house has always meant establishing a precise relationship with the place: with the climate, the topography, the orientation, and the ways of inhabiting. Houses learned from the land, the wind, and the rain; they sought the sun when it appeared and withdrew when winter pressed hard. They were not born to stand out, but to endure.
This project stems from that way of understanding architecture. The house does not seek to reproduce a traditional image or rely on nostalgia, but rather to recover the principles that shaped Galician rural architecture for centuries: compactness, shelter from the climate, careful integration with the terrain, and a restrained scale.
The house is organized around a main volume with a pitched roof, articulated around a central courtyard: a protected void around which everyday life unfolds. Rather than presenting itself, the house turns inward. It creates shelter, filters views, and generates intermediate spaces where interior and landscape establish a calm relationship. It closes itself to the north and opens to the south and west, seeking light when it appears and warmth in winter.
There is something profoundly rural in this way of settling into the site. The house does not seek exposure, but protection. The central courtyard acts as a domestic refuge, a sheltered space that allows outdoor living and synchronizes life with the rhythms of the climate and the seasons. The house does not aim to impose itself upon the landscape, but to become part of it.
The interior organization also draws on a rural logic: a main floor linked to domestic life and a lower level intended for the house’s functional support, reinterpreting a way of living in which the everyday and the practical have always coexisted naturally.
The materiality, sober and restrained, avoids any nostalgic gesture. Its connection to the place is not built through imitation, but through proportion, scale, and a certain way of resting upon the land, as if the house had gradually found its way to belong.
A contemporary house, rooted not in an image of the past, but in the principles that for centuries made it possible to live here.
