AWP Splits a Steel House Between a Perforated Street Membrane and an Open Golf Course Facade

Veredas House sits inside the Bosque Real Country Club in Huixquilucan, State of Mexico, on a plot with two very different neighbors. To the south runs a wide road carrying medium-speed traffic, ending at a stand of white cedar. To the north the land drops away to a long, natural view across four fairways of a PGA golf course. AWP, led here by Hernán Pernett Steel and Hernán Pernett Muñoz, designed the 990 m² house through its architecture division and built it through its own construction arm. It was completed in 2017.

What makes the project worth your attention is how bluntly it answers that split. Instead of a single attitude toward the site, the house adopts two. The street side is a closed, identifiable volume the architects call the "membrane": a multi-perforated skin of black cement-board panel wrapped over a steel frame. The golf course side opens up in glass and concrete. The plan is organized around a box deliberately offset from the main structure, so the duality is spatial as well as visual. We think this is a disciplined reading of a suburban site, the kind of place where houses often default to showing off on every face.

The Membrane Facing the Road

From the street, the house reads almost as an object rather than a dwelling. The dotted panel sits under a thin cantilevered roof, and at dusk it becomes a dark, even field with no obvious windows, doors or signs of domestic life. The black and white views make the point clearly: the pattern of holes is regular enough to read as texture, not as a series of openings.

This is privacy without the usual hedge or perimeter wall. The membrane does the work of a fence while staying part of the architecture. On a road with steady traffic and neighbors in plain view, that is a sensible move, and it gives the house a clear identity at the point where visitors first meet it.

A Steel Frame Held at a Distance

The steel structure is never hidden behind the skin. At the corners you see beams pass beyond the screen, glass walls set back behind it, and a timber deck reaching out into planted beds. The screen behaves like a layer hung in front of the frame rather than a wall that carries anything, and AWP lets that relationship stay legible.

The offset box is easiest to understand here. Because the enclosed volume does not line up neatly with the structural grid, gaps open between frame, glass and screen. Those gaps hold planters, grasses and shade, so the edge of the house becomes a thick zone instead of a hard line.

Seeing Out Without Being Seen

The membrane works differently from each side. From outside it reads as a solid wall. From inside, the round holes break the view into points, so you get partial glimpses of the cedar forest across the road while daylight falls through in a dotted pattern. Looking along a steel column toward the screen, the perforations read as a lit surface rather than a barrier.

The underside view shows another side of the same idea: under certain light the openings glow blue, picking up the sky. It is a modest effect, but it shows the screen responding to time of day instead of staying fixed. A single material answers both privacy and outlook, which is more economical than layering curtains, blinds and walls.

Concrete and Travertine as Counterweight

Against the lightness of steel and perforated panel, AWP sets heavy surfaces: board-formed concrete walls with visible timber marks and stepped travertine that climbs alongside a dark stair. These walls anchor the house to its slope. Where the membrane flickers, they stay still.

The courtyard defined by tall concrete walls is one of the quieter spaces in the set. A single black planter of ferns and a slender tree are enough to make it an outdoor room. The restraint helps; a fussier planting scheme would have diluted the rawness of the board marks.

Stairs, Voids and Interior Light

Inside, the steel structure stays exposed. A double-height hall shows beams overhead and a glass balustrade at the mezzanine, while an open stair with dark stone treads keeps sightlines running between levels. Sunlight lands on polished concrete floors and moves across the room over the day.

A skylight strip and a sliding window frame the lawn and distant towers, a reminder that this is a suburban development and not a wilderness retreat. The interior does not pretend otherwise. It uses glazing selectively to pull in sky and green, and it leaves the surfaces plain.

Opening to the Fairways

Seen from the hillside, the house changes character. Long glazed terraces stack above a white slotted wall, and palm trees and a forested slope frame the composition. This is the open face of the project, turned toward the golf course and the deep view the north side of the plot offers.

Even here, a piece of perforated panel hovers above the glazing, so the membrane is not purely a street device. The narrow gap between travertine wall and screen, photographed under heavy cloud, shows how carefully the two systems meet. You sense the house was assembled as a set of layers that slide past one another, not as a single sealed box.

Plans and Drawings

The drawings explain how much of the house sits below the street. The sub-level plans show living, dining, bedrooms and service spaces organized around two open courtyards beside a curving lower road, while the ground floor holds a central glazed pavilion with a sunken court and the garage. The first floor narrows to a bedroom block with paired bathrooms and a louvered volume.

The elevations make the duality plain. The front reads as a long glazed box with a thin roof over a dark base; the rear steps down the slope in terraced volumes against tall conifers. The longitudinal section confirms the three-storey volume cut into the hillside, with internal stairs tying the levels together under a sloped roof.

Why This Project Matters

Country club houses often treat every facade as a display surface. Veredas House argues for something more precise: read the site first, then give each edge only what it needs. A closed, perforated face toward a busy road and an open, glazed face toward a long view is not a new idea, but AWP executes it with real clarity, and the offset box turns the concept into actual spatial depth rather than a change of cladding.

It is also a useful case of a practice that both designs and builds. Steel frame, cement-board screen, board-formed concrete and travertine are assembled with visible joints and deliberate gaps, the kind of detailing that tends to survive when the same team controls design and construction. For anyone designing on a split suburban plot, the lesson is direct: privacy and openness do not have to be traded off if you assign them to different sides of the house.

Veredas House by AWP (Hernán Pernett Steel and Hernán Pernett Muñoz), Bosque Real Country Club, Huixquilucan, State of Mexico. Area: 990 m². Completed: 2017. Photography: Luis Gordoa.

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