404 Arquitectura Suspends a Concrete Beam Across a Lima Garden to Structure Domestic Life

Most houses in Lima's residential districts resolve privacy with walls. Trama House, designed by 404 Arquitectura under the direction of Diego Hernández Escribens and Israel Ascarruz, resolves it with weight. A second volume of exposed, board-formed concrete spans the site as an inhabited beam, perpendicular to a low, dark mineral base that runs along the street edge. The result is a house that organizes domestic space inward, not through enclosure but through the careful orchestration of mass, voids, and the shadows they produce.

What makes this project genuinely interesting is its refusal to treat concrete as spectacle. Here, the material is method. The elevated beam does not hover for effect; it structures movement on the ground, frames views into flanking courtyards, shelters social spaces beneath its soffit, and delivers privacy to bedrooms above without a single gratuitous gesture. The architecture produces function rather than representing it, and that discipline holds from the street threshold to the pool terrace at the back of the site.

A Dark Base and a Hovering Body

From the street, the house reads as two distinct conditions stacked. A continuous black bar sits along the front edge of the plot, absorbing the entrance, parking, service areas, gym, and kitchen into its mass. Above and behind it, the board-formed concrete beam lifts free, cantilevering outward to shelter the approach. The dark base mitigates heat while grounding the composition; the pale, textured concrete above catches Lima's diffused overcast light and holds the imprint of its formwork like a geological record.

The junction between these two materials, visible at the corner details where black meets grey, is handled with surgical precision. There is no trim, no transition piece, no reveal. One volume simply stops and the other begins, each legible as an independent structural act. That clarity is what gives the street elevation its tension: it reads as taut and composed rather than merely heavy.

Entering Through Shadow

Arrival at Trama House is a sequence of compressions. You pass beneath the cantilevered concrete soffit, through a paver-lined entry flanked by potted trees, and into a curved corridor where the ceiling drops and the light fades. The curved board-formed concrete overhead is not decorative; it directs you physically and psychologically from the public realm into the interior. By the time you reach the double-height vestibule beyond, the shift feels earned.

The entry sequence recalls the stoa: a linear, sheltered strip that mediates between outside and inside, accommodating the main ground-floor circulation. Pendant lights punctuate the alcove, and the brick pavers underfoot signal a zone that belongs neither fully to the garden nor to the house. It is threshold architecture in the most literal sense, and it sets the tone for a building that treats every transition as an event.

Living Under the Beam

The social heart of the house unfolds in shade beneath the elevated concrete volume. A longitudinal fireplace wall, finished in blackened steel, anchors the living room and orients the eye toward the courtyard beyond, where lounge chairs sit in filtered light. The timber deck terrace extends out past the columns toward the pool and lawn, blurring the line between covered interior and open garden. Concrete pilotis frame these views without interrupting them.

This arrangement means the family's communal life happens in the coolest, most protected zone of the house. The beam overhead is not merely structural; it is climatic infrastructure, casting the deep shade that makes outdoor living viable in Lima's warm months. The corridors connecting these spaces, with their board-formed walls and continuous timber flooring, feel like inhabited gaps between tectonic plates: narrow, calm, and charged with the material weight pressing in on either side.

Courtyards and the Tree That Stays

Two courtyards flank the concrete beam, converting what could have been leftover lot space into the organizing principle of the plan. One opens toward misty mountain views, its planted beds and lawn pressed against the board-formed walls; the other is a tighter interior garden framed by floor-to-ceiling glass and crowned by a skylight. Together they deliver cross-ventilation, indirect light, and a sense of scale that belies the 750 square meters.

The most telling detail is the tree. At one point, the concrete volume yields, its mass carved to allow an existing trunk to pass through. It is a small gesture with large implications: the architecture defers to what was already on the site. The landscape design, by Titi Laurie, works within this logic, treating planting not as decoration but as spatial counterweight to the heavy concrete surfaces. Fiddle-leaf figs and palms soften corners without undermining the severity of the material palette.

The Corten Stair as Autonomous Element

Connecting the public ground floor to the private upper level, a wide, freestanding staircase of corten steel rises between board-formed concrete walls. Its timber treads extend the continuous wooden floor surface vertically, making the ascent feel like a continuation of the ground plane rather than a departure from it. Steel cable railings keep the visual mass low, ensuring the stair reads as a single, autonomous piece of furniture inserted between two tectonic walls.

The corten finish introduces the only warm-toned metal in the project, and it earns its place precisely because it ages. Over time it will darken and patinate alongside the concrete, reinforcing the sense that Trama House is designed to weather rather than to remain pristine. This is a house that treats time as a collaborator.

Private Life Above

Upstairs, the inhabited beam contains the nocturnal program: a family room and bedrooms, each opening to private balconies that face the garden and pool. The glazed openings visible from the garden elevation are generous but carefully positioned, framing long views while keeping the rooms withdrawn from the street. Voids carved into the concrete introduce indirect light into the main bedroom, a technique that avoids direct solar gain while maintaining a sense of connection to the sky.

Inside these upper rooms, the board-formed concrete walls give way to warmer surfaces. A curved concrete wall wraps around a timber bench with wooden flooring, creating a reading alcove that is simultaneously monolithic and intimate. The tension between the raw structural shell and the refined timber lining is sustained without either material winning; they coexist, each revealing the other's qualities by contrast.

The Outdoor Grill and Sculptural Supports

At the far end of the site, the concrete body comes to rest on two sculptural supports, sheltering an outdoor grill area. This is where the beam's structural logic becomes most legible: the mass touches down, and the space it creates beneath is neither interior nor exterior but something in between. Palm trees rise alongside, their vertical trunks counterpointing the horizontal span. The timber deck terrace extends into this zone, and from here the entire choreography of the house, from dark base to hovering beam to courtyard to pool, unfolds in a single longitudinal view.

Plans and Drawings

The floor plans confirm what the photographs suggest: the house is organized as two intersecting bars that define triangular and rectangular courtyards. The diagonal paving patterns in the outdoor spaces register in plan as a deliberate counterpoint to the orthogonal rigor of the rooms. The sections are equally revealing, showing the split-level relationship between base and beam and the colonnade that connects them. The elevated volume's generous overhang is clearly dimensioned, and the palm trees indicated in silhouette reinforce the landscape's role as a structural element in its own right.

The axonometric drawing is perhaps the most instructive: it reveals how the rectangular volumes lock around the central courtyard, with the pool positioned as a terminal event at the garden's far end. From this vantage, the house reads not as a building with a garden but as a garden organized by two pieces of concrete, which is precisely the point.

Why This Project Matters

Trama House matters because it demonstrates that concrete, the most overused material in contemporary residential architecture, still has something to teach us when it is deployed with structural intelligence rather than aesthetic ambition. The inhabited beam is not a signature move or a formal caprice; it is a device that simultaneously resolves structure, climate, privacy, and spatial sequence. Every decision in the house flows from that one commitment, and the result is a building with almost no wasted gestures.

For 404 Arquitectura, the project advances a position that architecture should be conceived as method, not image. In a market where Lima's residential districts are filling with houses that perform luxury through surface finish and imported cladding, Trama House insists that the work of architecture is spatial, structural, and climatic before it is visual. That the house also happens to photograph beautifully is a consequence of its logic, not its goal, and that distinction is worth defending.

Trama House by 404 Arquitectura, led by Diego Hernández Escribens and Israel Ascarruz. La Molina, Peru. 750 m². Completed 2024. Photography by Renzo Rebagliati.

About the Studio

Share Your Own Work on uni.xyz

If projects like this are the kind of work you want to make, uni.xyz is a place to publish your own, find collaborators, and enter design competitions.