Fran Silvestre Arquitectos Carves a Las Rozas House from Five Obliquely Cut White Cylinders

On a gently sloping 2,500 m² plot on the edge of Madrid, Fran Silvestre Arquitectos has built a 370 m² house from five white cylinders. Each drum holds one part of the program: bedrooms, living, garage and wellness, pool and plant, and the entrance. Orthogonal junctions tie them together, and the open side of the cluster faces the Sierra de Guadarrama.

The interesting part is not the circle, which the Valencian studio has used before. It is the cut. Every cylinder is sliced obliquely, so each roof tilts. In a municipality that expects pitched roofs, that slanted ellipse meets the local rule with a single geometric move and leaves the familiar gable behind. The house is suburban compliance, rewritten in pure geometry.

A Cluster Read from Above

Seen from the air, the house looks more like a set of round plates dropped among the oaks than a single building. The aerial views show what the street hides: the drums are distinct objects, each topped with gravel, and they share walls only where the plan needs a connection.

Placed against the surrounding neighbourhood of pitched-roof villas, the cluster is clearly foreign, yet it is not loud. The white render takes on the colour of the light, warm at dusk and pale violet after sunset, so the volumes register as changing surfaces rather than fixed icons.

Oblique Cuts as Roof and Structure

The slanted rims do three jobs. They form the roof pitch, they shape the skyline against the cypresses and pines, and, because the curved walls carry the loads, they define the structure itself. Engineering came from Estructuras Singulares, and the geometry they worked with leaves almost nothing to hide behind: no fascia, no gutter line, only a parapet edge that rises and falls.

Where two cylinders meet, the orthogonal walls close at 120 degrees and leave a small inner courtyard. Looking up from that gap, you see curve and plane converge on a thin strip of sky. It is the most intimate moment in the house, and it exists only because the drums do not fully merge.

The Raised Pool Drum

Lifting the pool into its own elevated cylinder is the plan's boldest decision. It sits above the plant room and can be reached from the living, dining, kitchen and bedroom terraces, so the water serves as a shared upper deck rather than a garden feature at the bottom of the lawn.

The semicircular basin, with its stepped entry, matches the arc of the drum around it. From above, the long shadow across the deck shows how strongly the walls shape the light. You get privacy from the street and a direct view to the mountains, which a ground-level pool on this slope could not have offered.

Glazed Living Level Facing the Sierra

The living drum is the one place where the white shell opens fully. A continuous band of full-height sliding glass wraps the curve and turns the room into a viewing ring toward the Guadarrama. A rounded balcony projects out of the same arc, so the outdoor edge follows the geometry of the room inside.

Interiors are by Alfaro Hofmann, and the family name matters. The architects point to Andreu Alfaro's sculpture Homage to Brancusi as an intuitive starting point. The link is a temperament, not a borrowed form: stacked, pared-back solids that rely on proportion and light rather than ornament.

Entry, Threshold and Night

The entrance gets its own cylinder, and the approach is handled with restraint: a curved wall, concrete steps, and a planted bed holding a single olive tree. The curve guides you in without a door canopy or any other signal. The building's form does the wayfinding.

At night a continuous light line traces the inner curve of a half-moon room, which makes the plan geometry readable from inside. It is a small detail, but it shows that the circle is meant to be lived in, not just looked at from the drone.

Plans and Drawings

The ground floor plan shows circular volumes arranged around a triangular core, with living, kitchen, bedroom and garage spaces each placed in its own drum. The roof plan makes the oblique cuts legible as overlapping outlines with diagonal slices. A skylight on one volume adds a second light source to the cut-in daylight.

The sections and elevations explain the slope strategy. The drums step down the hillside, lower levels sit partly below grade, and the tilted roof planes vary in height so the house rises out of the terrain rather than resting on a flattened pad. The northeast elevation, with its long glazed band stretched between curved volumes, is the clearest single drawing of the project.

Why This Project Matters

Suburban planning codes usually produce sameness: the same pitch, the same eaves, the same house repeated down the street. Here the pitched-roof rule is met through geometry rather than imitation. Each roof slopes because its cylinder has been cut, and the requirement becomes the generator of the form instead of a constraint applied afterward.

The project also makes a case for program-per-volume planning at a domestic scale. Giving each function its own drum, terrace and light condition adds envelope and complexity, and a 370 m² house carries that cost. In exchange you get a house that is easy to read, where moving between rooms means moving between distinct places. The trade is worth studying, especially for anyone building on a slope with a view.

House in Las Rozas, Madrid by Fran Silvestre Arquitectos (Fran Silvestre, Olga Martín, Ricardo Candela). Location: Las Rozas de Madrid, Spain. Area: 370 m². Year: 2026. Photography: Fernando Guerra | FG+SG.

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