Experience the Bold Simplicity of XStudio's Naked House Design

Naked House is located in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, in the historic working-class neighbourhood of Guanarteme, which in recent years has become a victim of the city's rampant urban growth. This expansion has abruptly transformed the surrounding building fabric, in which large-scale buildings coexist with humble self-built homes. The project, which intervenes in one of these old houses, was born as an opportunity to claim another way of living, betting on an exercise of recovery and enhancement of what exists, understanding as its main asset the historical and cultural context in which the original architecture took place. The new program includes the use of a design studio on the ground floor, a house on the first floor and a recreation area on the roof floor. The intervention is faced from the austerity of means, both material and economic, as a strategy to shape a new domestic space, creating an inner world that allows putting some distance from the environment.

Within this approach, the project is worked from the section, recovering and enhancing the patio as a backbone void around which the different spaces are organized. Its existing holes are expanded, favouring visual connections and allowing the house to be turned inside. Likewise, the building opens from the top through the insertion of three skylights that promote a new relationship with the outside, directing the gaze to the sky and multiplying the entry of natural light. In the material definition, the interior envelope is stripped bare by means of a stripping exercise that rescues the history of the building, revealing materials and construction techniques of the original construction. In this way, concrete slabs, load-bearing walls made of sand-lime bricks and "drawer" walls make up a new landscape that combines raw and white finishes, and in which the incidence of light enhances the different textures. Following the logic of the intervention, the layout of the facilities is understood as a superimposed layer, highlighting the contrast between the existing and the new. For the rest of the added elements, a simple palette of materials is used: pine wood for the furniture and new carpentry, all designed to measure, micro cement in the wet areas and troweled concrete for the pavement, thus generating a duality between the new floor and original roof.  

Architects: XStudio

Area: 142 m²

Year: 2020

Photographs: David Rodríguez

Manufacturers: Roca

Lead Architect: Leticia Romero Hernández, Ancor Suárez Suárez