Excerpt: House Of Light by Materia features a sensory-driven design that balances privacy and openness through solid volumes and intentional voids. A central circulation axis weaves the residence through framed garden views, gradually dissolving into an open terrace facing the golf course. Light, water, and shadow animate chukum-plastered walls, wood screens, and reflective pools, creating a timeless interplay of materiality, nature, and space.
Project Description
[Text as submitted by architect] The design did not aim to depart from a stylistic approach, but rather from an understanding of the site and a way of setting privacy levels within a sensory experience of its spaces. The program spaces were arranged together based on how porous and open their functions required to be to the exterior, to establish a main circulation axis then pushing aside the spaces and creating voids between them that become intentioned framed views to the north garden. As a consequence, the house is read from the street as a game of solid volumes that come to shroud an access portal. The access garden leads up to the portal by a series of platforms amid a sloping lawn.
Once crossing the main door, the circulation acts as a transitional axis discovering a series of carved paces by light that become intentioned framed views to the north garden but lead up to the public area where the mass of the walls fully dissolves becoming a full view and terrace out to the garden and the golf course beyond. The ground floor circulation also gives way to the stairs up to the bedrooms, experiencing a two-story space.
As with the trees, water is always a present element. The house is surrounded by reflecting pools or the swimming pool, including a swim lane, that provide constant reflections of light onto the ceilings and walls of the house’s interior. The spatial strategy combined with the use of light called for simplicity and subtleness in the materiality.
All walls are plastered in chukum, a natural plaster from Mexico, adding character, texture and a crisp reading of the architectural volumes. A set of carefully placed wood screens project shadows on the walls that add to the ones from the trees, making the surface constantly changing throughout the day. Marble and wood complete the interiors.
The landscape was carefully crafted to filter the access and allow for the greenery to take over the house, including an exterior shower and tub and built-in planters around the terraces and balconies on the first floor. The resulting experience is one of luxury based on simplicity and a sense of place. Light, water, shadow, and reflection become constant events and allow for a timeless character to emerge.
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