Isoba House | ESTUDIO BHER

Isoba House is a hidden oasis in Puente Castro, a peripheral neighbourhood of León with a rural atmosphere and enclosed blocks formed by modest buildings.

The urban, morphological and orientation conditions of the site apparently clash with the initial requirements. The commission consists of a house for a couple and their two daughters, but with a very large family who loves to get together. For this purpose they need a generous day-use area on the ground floor, and also an accessible bedroom, all facing the garden. They also require a street level garage for two cars.

Urban planning regulations foresee for their plot a multi-family block of at least three floors, and aligned with the access street, which faces south. Projecting a “vertical” house -strictly adjusting ourselves to these conditions-, would have meant that any room looking towards the garden would have been north orientated, and consequently the adjacent patio would have been permanently in shadow.

The regulations do contemplate the possibility of filling the entire ground floor, which opens up a new option: reversing the orientation of the house by attaching the main dwelling to the north boundary and leaving the garden at its south side.

We decide to segregate the program into two parts: the main house, all of it on the ground floor; and a small guest house facing the street and with two upper storeys, which frees up an open space for parking underneath, and which meets the urban requirements in terms of alignments and minimum height.

The urban façade of this guest pavilion does not in any way reveals that behind the entrance door there is a courtyard house, designed for the comfort and enjoyment of its inhabitants in a green and private setting.

After the first view of the garden and pool, the main house is found at the back, under a roof that covers the full width of the plot by leaning on the closing walls, reinforcing the idea of a house in a garden.

As all of its perimeter walls work simultaneously as property walls -with the exception of the south façade-, the natural lighting and ventilation necessities are resolved through patios. These patios also articulate the different rooms according to their degree of privacy, generating great visual permeability and the consequent dissolution of the limits between inside and outside, between house and nature.

The result is a house flooded with light, which by fleeing the obvious solves the needs of its inhabitants, improving all the expectations they had placed on their new home.