VEJER DE LA FRONTERA · REFURBISHMENT · 2023
Casa entre cales
Three adjoining houses. One single home.
But in between, a courtyard that knows
when to be shade and when to be light.
The old lime is still there. So is the new.
Neither apologises.
The house occupies the plot of three adjoining homes in the historic centre of Vejer. Party walls and outer volume were retained by the brief. Everything else was open.
01 — The courtyard
A rectangular courtyard opens the plan upwards.
An olive tree at its centre measures the day.
Light enters from above and runs down the limewashed walls onto the microcement floor, which gives it back warmer.
The whole house is organised around it.
02 — The interior
The rooms keep the original chestnut beams and the lime applied by hand on the old walls. Where new structure appears, it does so in board-formed exposed concrete, neither imitating the old nor hiding from it. Built-in joinery is also chestnut, brought from the Sierra de Aracena. Each thing declares when it was made.
03 — The materials
Lime was applied by hand, layer over layer, until it found the tone of the Andalusian light. The chestnut arrived untreated, was planed on site and oiled at the end. Concrete was poured against rough timber boards and left as it came out. Nothing was painted: each material shows its own colour.
- PLACE
- Vejer de la Frontera, Cádiz
- PROGRAMME
- Residential refurbishment
- FLOOR AREA
- 320 m² built
- STATUS
- Completed
- YEAR
- 2023
- TEAM
- Adarve (project and supervision)
- COLLABORATORS
- María Asensio (structures)
- Talleres Galván (joinery)
- Cantería Pruña (stone)
- PUBLICATION
- Arquitectura Viva 254
- AWARDS
- FAD Mention 2024
- PHOTOGRAPHY
- Julio Sánchez García
"The project doesn't add. It removes what was in the way."