Minimo Comun Arquitectura Builds a 63 m² Two-Storey House Among Four Trees in Asunción

Asunción is a small capital with a large shadow. The city proper holds around 525,000 people, roughly 7.5% of Paraguay's population, but its metropolitan area keeps spreading into lots that are rarely generous and budgets that are rarely forgiving. Jota House, completed in 2017 in the Santa Rosa neighbourhood by Minimo Comun Arquitectura, works inside those limits. It is 63 m² in total, split over two floors, and the studio built it themselves.

What interests us is not the small area alone. Many houses are small. The interesting part is what the plans show about priorities. The house is a square block, and the drawings give as much attention to four existing trees, a gravel pad and a parked car as to the rooms. That tells you the architects treated the plot as one composition. The building is only one part of it. The team of Verónica Villate, Solanito Benítez and Sergei Jermolieff also took on construction, which collapses the usual gap between drawing and building.

A Square Volume Held by Four Trees

The ground floor plan places a compact square in the middle of four trees. Each tree appears to sit near a corner, so the house reads less as an object on a lot and more as a room the trees have agreed to frame. In a climate as hot as Asunción's, that matters. Canopy over a small footprint is shade you don't have to build.

The car on its gravel pad is drawn plainly, with no attempt to hide it. We like that honesty. Parking is a real demand on an urban Paraguayan lot. A loose, permeable surface beside the house handles it without adding a garage to a 63 m² budget.

Living Compressed into One Ground Floor

The lower level holds a stair, a kitchen built around an island and a bathroom. The rest of the plan is left open. The kitchen island does a lot of work here. It is where you cook, eat, talk and work, and it anchors the room so the open space doesn't feel empty.

The stair is the other important piece. In a plan this small, the stair's position decides how the whole floor circulates. The drawings suggest it was placed to keep the open living area as one continuous space rather than cutting it in two.

Sleeping Above, with a Terrace in the Canopy

Upstairs, the program shrinks to a bedroom with a double bed and a small terrace. Nothing else is asked of this floor. The upper plan draws the four tree canopies overhead, so the terrace sits at roughly leaf height. You step out into foliage, not onto a street view.

Stacking public below and private above is an old move. On a footprint this tight, though, it pays off: the house can give its full width to living downstairs and still offer a bedroom with its own outdoor space.

Architects as Their Own Builders

Minimo Comun Arquitectura acted as contractor on Jota House. Paraguayan practice has a strong tradition of architects working directly with construction, and this project belongs to it. Self-building changes the economics: decisions can be tested on site, and money that would go to a builder's margin can go into the work.

Self-building also changes accountability. When the people who draw the house also build it, the drawings are instructions to themselves. That probably explains why the plans are so plain and specific. They show what is needed and little else.

Plans and Drawings

Read the two plans together. The ground floor sets out the square, the stair, the kitchen island, the bathroom, the gravel pad and the car. The upper floor keeps the stair's position and adds only a bedroom and a terrace. The four trees appear in both drawings, as trunks below and as canopies above. That shows they were part of the design from the start.

Why This Project Matters

Latin American cities keep growing through small private lots and tight budgets. Jota House shows a way of working at that scale. It doesn't treat 63 m² as a shortfall to disguise. It treats it as a frame for clear choices: one open living floor, one private floor, trees kept, a car accommodated on gravel rather than concrete.

It also shows a model of practice. By designing and building the house themselves, Villate, Benítez and Jermolieff kept control of the project from first sketch to finished site. For young studios facing the same economic pressures across the region, that is the more useful lesson. Small work done directly and precisely is how a practice builds a body of work it can stand behind.

Jota House by Minimo Comun Arquitectura (Verónica Villate, Solanito Benítez, Sergei Jermolieff). Santa Rosa, Asunción, Paraguay. Area: 63 m². Completed: 2017.

About the Studio

Minimo Comun Arquitectura

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