iHouse estudio Tucks a Prefab Timber Pavilion into the Pine Trees of Punta del Este

There is a particular kind of restraint that small houses demand. When the total area barely cracks 969 square feet, every gesture counts twice: once for the space it creates and once for the space it forecloses. Lavender House, designed by iHouse estudio leads Andrés Garcia and Marcelo Mederos in Punta del Este, Uruguay, operates with that economy. Completed in 2021 on a void lot in a consolidated neighborhood, the house is a single-storey timber-clad volume slipped beneath existing pines, its floor plan stretched into a line to maximize the interface between interior life and the garden its owners had been quietly cultivating.

What makes Lavender House worth studying isn't the formal novelty of a glass-and-wood pavilion in a wooded clearing. That typology is well-worn. The interest here is the means: iHouse estudio's industrialized construction system, which delivers prefabricated modules by flatbed truck and assembles them on site. The studio treats modular fabrication not as a concession to speed or cost, but as a design discipline, one that forces legibility in the plan and honesty in the joint. The result is a house that reads as crafted despite being factory-born.

A Line Through the Trees

The house sits long and low, barely registering against the canopy of mature pine trees that dominate the lot. The footprint is emphatically linear, a strategy that serves two purposes. First, it minimizes the disturbance to existing root systems and tree positions, allowing the building to thread between trunks rather than clearing them. Second, the elongated plan guarantees that nearly every room touches the garden on at least one side. There is no deep, landlocked center to this house.

Vertical timber cladding wraps the solid portions of the volume, its grain and rhythm echoing the surrounding pine trunks. Beneath dappled afternoon light, the building almost dissolves into its context, the weathered timber surface reading as another layer of bark and branch. The flat roof hovers just below the lowest pine boughs, reinforcing the sense that the house was placed, not built from the ground up.

Solid and Void Along the Facade

The long elevations alternate between solid timber bays and full-height glazed openings, creating a cadence that is both structural and experiential. The solid panels provide privacy for bedrooms and service spaces; the glass bays flood the living zones with light and garden views. This alternation isn't random. It follows the interior program faithfully, so the facade becomes a readable diagram of the plan behind it.

Vertical timber fins between the glazed sections act as sun screens and visual dividers, softening the transition between inside and out. The covered entry passage, lined with wood on the soffit, compresses the visitor's view before releasing it into the open living space beyond. It's a simple sequence, porch to passage to room, but the material consistency of the timber makes it feel continuous.

Living Between Glass Walls

The open-plan living, dining, and kitchen zone occupies the heart of the plan, flanked by glass on both long sides. A wood slat ceiling runs overhead, its diagonal detail adding a layer of texture to what is otherwise a deliberately minimal palette of white surfaces, timber, and concrete. The slats filter light from above and lend the room a warm acoustic quality, dampening the reflective surfaces of so much glass.

The dining area sits flush with a timber deck that extends into the garden, and when the sliding glass doors are open, the boundary between room and terrace effectively disappears. The kitchen, fitted with white cabinetry and a horizontal window, is tucked to one side but still participates in the garden view through folding glass doors. In a house this compact, the absence of corridors is critical. You move from zone to zone laterally, always with the landscape in peripheral vision.

The Garden as a Room

The owners reportedly began cultivating this garden well before the house arrived, developing a landscape of mature trees, ornamental grasses, and a swimming pool that connects the lot to the center of its block. The house was designed to serve this garden, not the other way around. The pool terrace, with its integrated firewood storage wall, operates as an outdoor living room, furnished by the house's overhang and the shade of the pines above.

The relationship between interior and landscape is not merely visual. The timber deck extends the floor plane outward, the flat roof projects beyond the glass line to create sheltered zones, and the grassy clearing in front acts as a forecourt that absorbs the house into its surroundings. At 969 square feet, the interior is modest. But the garden effectively doubles the usable area in warm months, making the site plan as important as the floor plan.

Twilight Transparency

Several of the most compelling images of Lavender House are shot at dusk, when the interior lighting turns the building into a lantern among the dark trunks. The glazed walls that absorb the garden view during the day reverse their role at night, projecting domestic life outward into the clearing. The reflecting pool at the rear elevation doubles this effect, mirroring the warm interior glow onto the water surface.

It's a revealing condition. At twilight, the timber cladding recedes into shadow and the house becomes its glass sections alone: a sequence of lit volumes hovering above the deck. The architectural move is simple, but the atmospheric payoff is significant. The house looks most resolved at the moment when its materiality is least visible, which tells you something about the priority of spatial proportion over surface treatment.

Kitchen and Interior Detail

The kitchen is a study in restraint: white flat-panel cabinetry, a continuous countertop, a horizontal ribbon window that admits light without competing with the full-height glazing elsewhere. Folding glass doors open the kitchen wall entirely onto the timber deck, transforming cooking from an enclosed activity into an extension of outdoor life. The material palette, white, timber, and glass, is consistent throughout, giving the small interior a visual coherence that makes it feel larger than its footprint.

Plans and Drawings

The drawings reveal a linear plan that separates sleeping from living with surgical clarity. The bedroom zone and the open living, dining, and kitchen area occupy distinct volumes linked by a narrow passage, a plan organization legible in the axonometric breakdowns. The site plans show how carefully the building footprint avoids the major tree positions, with landscape zones defined by varied surface treatments: deck, gravel, lawn, and pool.

The exploded axonometric is particularly instructive. It shows the house as two discrete volumes with a glass-walled living zone between them, a tripartite arrangement that explains the rhythmic facade from the inside out. The isometric drawings of the modular delivery and assembly sequence are rare documentation for a residential project of this scale. Flatbed trucks carry prefabricated sections to the site, where they are craned into position on prepared foundations. The drawings make explicit what the finished house conceals: this is an industrial product deployed with architectural care.

Why This Project Matters

Prefabrication in residential architecture too often announces itself through repetitive geometry or a clinical finish that betrays the factory floor. Lavender House pushes against that tendency. The timber cladding ages, the garden grows, and the house settles into its site with a patience that belies its rapid assembly. iHouse estudio's contribution here is not the invention of a new typology but the demonstration that an industrialized system can produce a house with genuine site specificity, one that responds to existing trees, local climate, and the particular desires of its owners.

At 969 square feet, the project also stands as a quiet argument for compact living done well. The plan is generous not because it is large but because it is open: to the garden, to the pool terrace, to the pine canopy overhead. Every square foot is either occupied or transparent, with no wasted circulation and no unnecessary enclosure. For a small house in a resort town, that legibility and economy feel like a principled stance, not a budget constraint.

Lavender House by iHouse estudio (Andrés Garcia, Marcelo Mederos). Punta del Este, Uruguay. 969 sq ft. Completed 2021. Photography by Aldo Lanzi.

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.