Croxatto y Opazo Raises a Slatted Timber Vacation Home on Stilts Above the Pacific in Matanzas

Matanzas sits on the Chilean coast about two and a half hours south of Santiago. It has become a weekend destination for city dwellers who want wind, surf and open hills. La Negrilla House by Croxatto y Opazo Arquitectos is a 152 m² vacation home completed in 2025. It sits on a slope roughly 50 meters above sea level, looking out over the Pacific and the rural coastline. The team of Nicolás Opazo, Felipe Croxatto, Martín Dellatorre and José Pablo O'Ryan has made a house that barely sits on its site. It hovers over it.

What interests us is how little the house asks of the ground. It is one long timber volume on a row of slender posts, so the hillside keeps falling away beneath it rather than being cut and terraced into a platform. A dark slatted skin reads as a single object from the road and the beach. That restraint makes a house of this size feel at once modest and quite bold in the landscape.

A Bar Lifted Off a Falling Slope

Seen from below, the house reads as a lantern balanced on stilts. At dusk the amber windows glow against a violet sky. In low evening sun the dark cladding turns warm and the posts almost disappear into the grass. The volume tapers and steps as it runs along the contours, which gives a simple bar a sense of motion.

Raising the house is the obvious choice on a steep coastal site, but here it is done with conviction. The posts are thin enough that the eye registers the slope first and the support second. You understand the topography by looking under the house, not by looking at retaining walls.

Structure as Lightness

Up close, the structure shows itself as a mix of steel and timber posts holding a pale wood-clad underside. That soffit is a quiet detail with a big effect. Because the belly of the house is light, the mass above seems to float rather than press down on its legs.

The deck and glass balustrade reach out at the end of the volume, so the strongest view comes with a sense of exposure. Standing out there at sunset, you are suspended between the hill behind and the ocean ahead. Structural engineer Luis Della Valle and builder Construction FCF had to make that thin line of support feel effortless. The photographs suggest they did.

A Dark Skin Against Green Hills

The cladding looks charred and nearly black, wrapped in vertical slats, with two flues breaking the low roofline. Against the green hills and the pale sea it reads as a mark, not a camouflage. Coastal Chilean houses often lean into whitewash or raw timber. This one chooses shadow, and the choice gives it a graphic clarity that a lighter finish would not.

From the air the roof reads as one dark plane above the timber deck, with a car parked on the dirt road that curves up the hill. The planted terraces visible below hint at landscape designer Javiera Uribe's work, which settles the ground around the posts and keeps the house tied to the vegetation instead of to an imposed garden.

Galleries and Filtered Edges

The narrow timber gallery is one of the best moments in the house. Vertical slats and a cable mesh guard frame a slice of ocean and beach. Instead of a picture window, the view comes in strips. That filtering gives the circulation a rhythm and stops the house from turning into one long glazed wall.

The open dining area under the slatted facade works the same way. It is outdoors, sheltered and screened, framed by wildflowers and a pink dusk sky. These in-between spaces are where a vacation home on a windy coast earns its keep.

Interiors Tuned to the Horizon

Inside, the program follows the long bar: living, kitchen and bedrooms in sequence. A black wood stove anchors the living area, with a tufted bench and herringbone coffee table set toward a glazed corner. The furniture is soft and low, so the sightlines go out to the coastline rather than stopping at objects in the room.

The kitchen pairs a marble-topped island with wooden stools and timber plank floors, right beside floor-to-ceiling glass. The palette is warm and limited. It does not compete with the view, and it does not try to. After the dark exterior, the warm interior feels like stepping into a hollowed-out log with one face opened to the sea.

Plans and Drawings

The plans make the logic clear. The upper level is a disciplined bar of living, kitchen and bedrooms, with a loggia and parking at the uphill end where the road arrives. The lower level is more relaxed: a covered dining area, an angled terrace and two stairs that respond to the falling contours. The long section shows stepped floor levels and a row of footings marching down the hillside.

The cross sections show floors raised on stilt foundations as the ground drops away. The east elevation shows the volume tapering along its length, its vertical slats set on a line of piers that follow the slope.

The north elevation reveals the compact glazed end above a cantilevered deck on two slender steel legs, which is the gesture that gives the house its presence. The west elevation shows the slatted volume pushing past its last columns, with a terrace at one end that grounds the composition.

Why This Project Matters

Coastal Chile is filling up with second homes, and many of them flatten slopes, pour platforms and impose suburban footprints on fragile hillsides. La Negrilla House offers a clear alternative at a modest scale. Lift the house, keep the footprint to a line of points, and let the terrain and vegetation stay continuous beneath it. It is not a new idea, but it is carried out here with real discipline.

The house also shows that a small program can hold a strong architectural identity without excess. One bar, one dark skin, one decisive cantilever toward the Pacific: Croxatto y Opazo have put their effort into a few moves and done each of them well. For anyone designing on a steep coastal lot, that economy is the lesson worth taking away.

La Negrilla House by Croxatto y Opazo Arquitectos (Nicolás Opazo, Felipe Croxatto, Martín Dellatorre, José Pablo O'Ryan). Location: Matanzas, Chile. Area: 152 m². Year: 2025. Construction: Construction FCF. Structural engineering: Luis Della Valle. Landscape design: Javiera Uribe. Photography: Cristóbal Palma.

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