A double-sided fireplace impacts the visitor upon entering the interior of this recently renovated old farmhouse, in the province of Cáceres. It stands with a sculptural, almost brutalist bearing, in a double-height space. It is the strong heart of an architectural complex that beats linked to livestock and ham production in the pastures of Extremadura.
The renovation project is due to the team made up of two offices, that of the architect Jorge Vidal and the interior designer Marcos Catalán. “We have always believed – they explain – that fire is representative of a home.” And they remember how in popular architecture the fireplace was a space where you could get into. “It is an element that we have wanted to give presence to. In some parts of the house, the rooms are not delimited with walls but with fireplaces.”
The proposed home recovers and enhances the local farmhouse typology. It separates the program into several bodies of changing geometry, favoring integration into the landscape, as if it were a village. Four volumes, plus a fifth one somewhat set aside as a storage for acorns, are articulated around a patio and face all directions of the environment. For the authors of the project, with an office in Barcelona, ??at the beginning it was about understanding the territory and how the farmhouse had been formed. Its proposal has been developed in a spatial and narrative sequence that goes from the countryside and the most public, to the most private, which are the rooms of the home.
Vidal and Catalán point out that their rehabilitation focuses on the recovery of rural Spain. “After years of depopulation and rural exodus, the reconstruction of old barns and stables stands as a lighthouse and example for society. “Recovering our architectural heritage means not only keeping our culture alive but also continuing to work the land, livestock farms and the much-needed connections between peoples.”
That is why at the same time as they were drafting the architectural project, the owner of the farm, with 250 hectares of holm oaks, sanitized and reactivated the productive field and reintroduced the Iberian pig. The request that the client made to them was the following: that the house be in absolute harmony with the place of the pasture, with a logic of continuity and what it means to live in a house rooted in the countryside.
Part of the current reform process resembles what it should have been like in the origins of the farmhouse, following the construction systems of the place. Vidal and Catalán selected the stones – slates and granites – from nearby quarries. Fallen trunks were recovered, and chestnut trees from the area were used to model the beams, furniture and carpentry. The aggregates and sands of the area were integrated into the concrete to form lintels, perimeter rings, chimneys and sinks, and gave it a stone appearance. The copper was handled right there and the taps were manufactured.
An execution with a high degree of craftsmanship that gives depth to the contemporary intervention and reconnects with tradition. All decisions were made in order to achieve sustainable rehabilitation, based on kilometer 0 materials.
“In addition – their creators explain – these materials behave optimally in the face of the extreme and changing climate of the valley: the local stone walls, with high thermal inertia, store heat during the hot Extremaduran summer days and cool down at night. . Likewise, in winter they also act as a heat reserve to face the cold nights of the region.”
In its configuration with various buildings, the farmhouse home is accessed through a patio facing south, as the culmination of a sequence of outdoor spaces between oaks and rocks. The new interior reveres the environment that has long been its reason for being: the pasture where the cattle graze. With the renovation, the house communicates with the outside through a series of openings festooned by large wooden frames.
“They not only frame the landscape, but they illuminate and ventilate the spacious rooms. These boxes are actually inhabited windows: artifacts that contain sofas, shelves, benches… and that provide the domesticity that the interior of a house requires,” points out the Vidal-Catalán tandem. Thus they have turned the facades into a reflection of the interior life.
Their determined and resounding proposal has earned them the FAD Architecture Prize, Interior Design section, and the Spanish Architecture Biennial Prize in the Precise Scales heading.
