Raem House

Sitting on a gentle slope, overlooking distant vineyards on a narrow valley, there is an outdoor room with some indoor spaces adjacent to it. This is a hidden room that contains a dry garden, some boulders, and rainwater. It is partially covered by four curved slabs, each one of them supported by a bold central column.

Since the house establishes a plinth over the landscape, without any predominant direction from within, the lateral sequence of narrow rooms is withdrawn to the back, slightly buried into the natural terrain, promoting an asymmetrical mediation with it.

There is a subtle compensation in size and proportion; the lineal distribution of the domestic program, even its reversible end-point condition, is always tangential to the centrality of the courtyard. This larger room, half covered by deep shadows, is an outdoor living space with punctual openings on every side.

Depending on the position of the sliding glass panels, the opacity of the cardinal projections is blocked by the mirage of another courtyard. Beyond this illusionary domain, the horizontal format of the house stands as a solitary abstract figure, with a seemingly organic void, but without a definite scale.

The reinforced concrete construction, with its yellow pigmentation, appears as a monolithic plate amidst broken stones and native bushes.