Bacatete House | RIMA Arquitectura

A single-family home, including three stories and a basement, rises out of this single-front rectangular site. 

The ground floor provides access to the driveway, footpath, main foyer, and service entrance, all of which are located at opposite ends of the property. It also houses the common and social spaces, including the living and dining rooms, study, kitchen, and guest bathroom. In terms of outdoor spaces, gardens are located at the front and rear of the property. A walkway extends along with the property from the entrance to the rear garden, allowing access to the home over a basement garden.

The first floor contains three bedrooms, each with its own bathroom and dressing room, a TV room, and a double-height terrace in the center of the built footprint. The second story contains the main bedroom with a lounge area, a dressing room, and a terrace facing the best view of the valley. The basement contains a covered parking area, a wine cellar, a gym, two service bedrooms with a bathroom, one utility room, a machine room, and a garden that provides natural light and ventilation to the living spaces.

 Architectural Concept

This project is governed by the idea of creating an urban home that transports you to a different place, away from the city, through a sensory experience. With this objective, we created an environment inside the property in which both the house and the outdoor spaces coexist and permeate the indoor-outdoor relationship. This was achieved by designing gardens that surround the house and create paths between nature and the building materials themselves, such as wood, stone, exposed concrete, carbon steel plate, and glass. In this way, the outdoor paths, which although they are simply due to the property’s dimensions, delineate a shift away from the city. We used different materials with rich, warm, and primitive textures for the exterior, while inside they become simpler and sophisticated.

Structural Description

To meet the objectives of the architectural concept, we used light structural elements that would allow the floor plan to accommodate all the design parameters without limiting the formal or architectural scope. The structural system includes steel columns and girders set on an angle and PTR, as well as solid slabs of reinforced concrete. The two cantilevered bodies used Vierendeel truss frames.