Estudi La Caseta Squares Off a Brick Volume on a Sloping Spanish Plot

A cube is the simplest possible house form, but placing one on a sloping site that opens onto two different streets is anything but simple. Estudi La Caseta, led by architect Alberto Facundo Tarazona, took that tension as the starting point for House Squared, a 378 square meter residence in Riba-roja de Túria, just west of Valencia. Completed in 2023, the house uses face brick, concrete, and a rigorously square plan to produce something that reads as both blunt and refined, an industrial sensibility filtered through residential calm.

What makes the project worth studying is not the minimalism itself, which is common enough in Mediterranean houses, but the way that minimalism is deployed across three distinct levels to create sharply different atmospheres. The ground floor is social and porous, the first floor is sealed and private, and the basement disappears entirely from public view. Each level has its own relationship to the street, to light, and to the surrounding terrain, all contained within the same compact volume.

Brick as Both Armor and Ornament

The facade is the first thing that announces the project's intentions. Pale face brick wraps the upper volume in a perforated screen, turning what could be a mute box into a lantern of filtered light. From the street, the house appears fortress-like, with few conventional openings at eye level and a young landscape of lawn and saplings that keeps the ground plane spare. The brick is not decorative appliqué: it is the structure's dominant material, giving the building a texture that shifts throughout the day as the sun tracks across the perforations.

The corridor image reveals the interior consequence of that screen. Dappled sunlight falls across a polished floor in a pattern that is almost textile in quality, turning a simple circulation space into one of the most atmospheric rooms in the house. It is a reminder that passive design strategies, when handled with care, produce spatial effects that no artificial lighting can replicate.

The Ground Floor as Social Engine

At ground level, House Squared operates as a single continuous room organized around a central service core that conceals the kitchen cabinetry and a toilet. The dining and kitchen zone, visible here with its timber sliding panels, flows directly into the living area without corridor interruptions. Timber acts as the warm counterpoint to the brick and concrete shell: sliding panels allow occupants to modulate privacy and openness according to the moment, from a fully exposed entertaining space to a more intimate arrangement.

The living room, photographed at dusk, shows the same yellow-toned brick continuing indoors, binding interior and exterior into a single material language. A circular pendant light floats above a grey sofa with the confidence of a piece that knows the room has been cleared of visual noise. The restraint is convincing because it is consistent: every element, from the light fixture to the built-in joinery, has been selected to hold its own in a room where there is nowhere to hide.

Corridors That Earn Their Keep

Circulation in minimalist houses is often an afterthought, a white hallway between rooms. Here the corridors are among the most considered spaces in the plan. Blonde wood cabinetry runs flush along one hallway wall, creating a continuous storage surface that doubles as the room's material character. Opposite, a flush-glazed window frames the perforated brick screen from inside, turning what would otherwise be a purely functional passage into a carefully composed view.

The perforated screen corridor works the same territory from a different angle. Light enters through hundreds of small openings and lands on the polished floor in a shifting mosaic. It is arguably the most photogenic space in the house, but it also performs a real job: it buffers the private rooms from direct solar gain while ventilating the upper floor naturally. Form and environmental performance converge in a single element, which is exactly what good passive design looks like.

Living on the Slope

The sloping site gives House Squared a trick that a flat plot could not: a basement level that opens directly to the lower street while remaining invisible from the upper approach. The gym and multipurpose room buried below grade gain natural light and discreet access without disrupting the cubic purity of the volume above. It is a strategy borrowed from hillside Mediterranean typologies, updated here with the clean lines of a contemporary program.

From the street view, the lawn and young trees suggest a landscape still maturing, a reminder that architecture on this kind of site is never truly finished at handover. In a few years the trees will begin to frame the brick volume differently, the perforations will be seen through foliage, and the house will settle further into its terrain. That patience, the willingness to design for a future condition rather than an opening-day photograph, is a quality that distinguishes this project from more performative minimalist boxes.

Why This Project Matters

House Squared succeeds because it treats the square plan not as a limitation but as a discipline. Every decision, from the perforated brick screen to the central service core, follows logically from the commitment to a compact, geometric volume. The result is a house that feels rigorous without feeling restrictive, industrial without feeling cold. Face brick, concrete, and timber are enough material palette for a lifetime when they are assembled with this level of attention.

More broadly, the project is a useful case study in how a sloping site can be leveraged rather than fought. By embedding the service and recreational program below grade and reserving the visible volume for living and sleeping, Estudi La Caseta keeps the public face of the house disciplined while providing a generous 378 square meters of floor area. It is a quiet house, not interested in spectacle, and that restraint is precisely what makes it worth a long look.

House Squared by Estudi La Caseta, lead architect Alberto Facundo Tarazona. Riba-roja de Túria, Spain. 378 m². Completed 2023. Photography by German Cabo.

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.