Holiday House in Vilapol by Padilla Nicás Arquitectos

Location: Vilapol, Lugo, Spain
Year: 2013
Area: 2,422 sqft
Photo courtesy: Jose Hevia
Description:

If something definitive the clients said to us was their desire to look towards the sea. The house is placed in a little town near the coast of Lugo, raised and oriented towards the landscape opened to the sea. Arriving Vilapol means leaving back the town of Xove to go through a dense eucalyptus forest until appearing in this peaceful and lonely little town, elevated from the surrounding lush landscape with the sea in its horizon. The feeling is to be alone facing all that.

The house is placed in a high triangular plot, on the edge of the only street in which every house is relied on. This geometry ends configuring its dynamic floor plan and subsequent volume, that reinforce the will of the house to orient itself to the landscape. Its position in the plot leaves a rear space that is used mainly as a parking, and a front one opposite the big porch in which the house is felt over. The more protected side of the house is the one where you gain access to the house.

Over time, the trees in the northeast corner will end up protecting the space that the occasional pedestrians could use. Being a vacation house, the open layout proposed facilitates the communication between rooms, placing the main ones in the front of the house that faces the sea. Around that covered space is where the relaxed vacational life will happen. All the rooms fall over it, and by its external stairs and the corresponding internal one, both floors are communicated, creating an easy and funny circular path. The bedrooms, placed in the top floor, enjoy outstanding views over the green landscape until reaching the sea.

Local natural slate floors with different treatments and orientations, synthesize the proposal and help seeing it as a simple container of vacational activity. The bathrooms and kitchen are covered with the traditional multi color tiles. The access doors to the bedrooms are told apart by using a green color. The bright colors of the interiors are used with the idea of cheering up the life in an environment that usually has the lead colored of the Galician skies.

In opposition, the external grayish blue color is associated with those skies trying to integrate the house with its context. The scale and layout of the openings try to integrate with the near constructions, without sacrificing the strong desire to open its most exposed facade towards the landscape. With this work we tried to make a cheerful and relaxed vacation home with the best understanding possible with the surroundings, and felt over towards the lush and peaceful coast landscape.