Marcio Kogan and studio mk27 Tuck a Lattice-Screened Timber Box Between Stone Walls Near Punta del Este

Most houses on open land try to capture the whole horizon at once. Punta House, completed in 2011 by Marcio Kogan of studio mk27 with co-author Suzana Glogowski, does something more careful. Built on an exposed lot beside a reservoir in the countryside outside Punta del Este, Uruguay, the single-level, 465 m² house treats the view as something to frame and ration. Part of the house faces the open landscape. The rest is closed off for shelter and privacy.

The design uses only a few elements: a flat concrete slab on regularly spaced pillars, stone walls of local piedras lajas that brace the slab and define the rooms, and a timber box underneath that holds the private program. What interests us is how far the house gets with so little. One side faces the water and the other turns toward an internal patio enclosed by stone. The whole scheme is a way of making shelter on a site that offered none, and it never becomes a fortress.

A Low Line on an Empty Field

From across the reservoir the house reads as a single horizontal line: a thin roof slab resting on stone, low enough to sit below the tree line. The site was effectively a rural wasteland with no prior building, so the architecture had to supply its own sense of enclosure. Two rough stone walls extend beyond the roof edge into the grass. They work less like facades and more like field boundaries, staking out territory in a landscape with no edges.

The restraint is deliberate. There is no second storey and no attempt at a sculptural profile. The house is meant to settle into the lot gradually as the wildflowers grow back around it. At dusk, uplighting along the base of the stone makes the slab look lighter than it is, which is the one theatrical gesture the house allows itself.

Stone Walls That Make the Rooms

The piedras lajas do two jobs. Structurally, the walls brace the concrete slab laterally. Spatially, the architects describe them as defining every space in the house. The stone is rough-cut and laid in a loose, rubbly pattern that catches low sun in deep golden tones, and it runs from wall to floor, so the ground plane and the vertical surfaces feel like the same material.

On the land side, the walls enclose a gravel patio planted with young trees and stepped in wide stone treads. This is the house's answer to an exposed site: a courtyard that blocks wind and sightlines, so the rooms facing it can be fully glazed without feeling exposed. The courtyard is also where the regional story belongs. A hornero, or oven-bird, built its mud nest on top of one of these walls, which local tradition reads as a sign of good luck.

The Mashrabiya Box

Under the slab sits a timber volume holding the bedrooms, which face the reservoir, and the kitchen and utility rooms, which face the patio. Its skin is a run of folding panels in a checkered mashrabiya lattice, the screen type that recurs across Kogan's work. Here it has a clear job. On a site with no trees to filter the light, the lattice provides that shade on the house itself.

The panels can fold back completely, so the box can be a closed, patterned cabinet or an open wall depending on time of day and season. The deck alongside is set with square tree pits, and as those saplings mature, they will add a second layer of shade in front of the timber. You can read the design as a sequence of filters: stone, then trees, then lattice, then glass.

Glass Pavilions at Either End

The two living rooms at the ends of the timber box are fully glazed. The concrete slab extends over them, and at the outer edges it cantilevers past the glass to shade the flagstone terraces. Seen across the gravel court at twilight, they glow, with the slab hovering above them on very little visible support.

This is the plan's main contrast: a solid, screened middle and transparent ends. Everyone shares the glazed rooms, while the private rooms sit in the screened middle. Because the courtyard walls already protect the land side, the glazing can wrap the full depth of each pavilion, with views of stone on one side and water on the other.

Living Under a Rustic Slab

Inside, the ceiling is the roof slab itself, left rough on purpose. Board marks from the formwork remain visible, and the structural elements are exposed. Paired with flagstone floors and a long, low concrete fireplace, the room has the weight of an old farm building, softened by Diana Radomysler's interiors and Beatriz Meyer's custom furniture: leather sofas, sheepskins and rust-coloured armchairs.

The photographs show the house at night with a long dinner table full of guests, and that seems the right test. The rustic finishes keep a 465 m² holiday house from feeling precious. In one frame, a stone lintel frames a sofa against the open landscape, a small reminder that the walls holding up the house also compose its views.

Deck, Pool and Veranda Facing the Water

The water side is where the house opens up. A long plank deck runs the length of the building beside an edge pool that seems to merge with the reservoir. This is the main outdoor living space, and it has the simple program of a summer house: loungers, shade and a horizon.

Beside the southern stone wall, the roof shelters a covered veranda and a barbecue, with a slender steel column and lounge chairs facing the lake. It is a modest corner. It shows how the stone wall protects the house: you sit with stone behind you and the open view ahead.

Plans and Drawings

The floor plan shows the logic more plainly than any photograph. A central block of bedrooms and service rooms sits between two open living and dining zones, and the plan is ringed by trees. The section confirms how thin the composition is: one roof plane, two stone walls and the human figure in between, with trees on either side carrying the roof line into the landscape.

Why This Project Matters

Punta House shows that an exposed site does not have to produce either a bunker or a glass box. Kogan and Glogowski divide the problem cleanly. Stone handles enclosure and climate, the slab provides shelter, timber lattice controls light, and glass is used only where the walls have already made it safe. Each material has one clear job, which is why the house reads so calmly.

It also argues for leaving materials rough. Local stone, concrete left as poured and timber screens that fold away age along with the wildflowers and saplings around them. More than a decade on, that is a useful lesson for rural houses everywhere: start with what the site lacks, build that first, and let the landscape fill in the rest.

Punta House by studio mk27, Marcio Kogan with co-author Suzana Glogowski; interiors by Diana Radomysler; custom furniture by Beatriz Meyer. Punta del Este, Uruguay. 465 m². Completed 2011. Photography by Reinaldo Cóser.

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