Paco Oria Estudio Rebuilds a 1949 Valencian Town House Around Timber, Terracotta, and a New Interior Patio

Most renovation projects in Mediterranean Spain default to reinforced concrete and steel, slotting contemporary volumes into old envelopes as though the only dialogue possible between eras is a material rupture. Paco Oria Estudio took the opposite approach with Baron39 House in Godella, a residential district just outside Valencia. The firm bought into the logic of the original 1949 structure, a pitched-roof semi-detached dwelling once built for carts, animals, and a backyard outbuilding, and then stripped it to the two things worth saving: the street facade and the party wall pillars. Everything else came down. What grew back is a 150 m² house framed almost entirely in laminated timber, finished in ceramic block and terracotta tile, and organized around a new interior patio that the original house never had.

The interesting move here is one of restraint that reads as abundance. Reinforced concrete and steel appear only where absolutely necessary: new foundations and a sanitary slab. Every other structural role, from pillars and beams to floor slabs built with sandwich panels, belongs to wood. Ceramic blocks form load-bearing walls where mass is needed, and terracotta tiles cover floors, plinths, and roof surfaces. These are not retro gestures. They are the materials that have always worked in this climate, chosen again because the reasons for choosing them the first time, thermal inertia, availability, breathability, have not expired.

Growing Vertically Within a Minimal Envelope

Godella's low-density zoning mandates semi-detached houses with backyards, and the street facade of Baron39 still reads as a modest plaster volume capped by barrel tiles. By day the house nearly disappears into its row. At dusk, illuminated windows reveal the vertical density packed behind that facade: a ground floor, a first floor, and an attic, all achieved by raising the elevation just enough to introduce an upper story and mezzanine levels within the gabled roof.

The strategy is deliberately surgical. Rather than extending the footprint horizontally, the house gains its extra surface by stacking rooms inside the existing plot boundaries. The staircase, bedrooms, and bathrooms climb through the section, using split levels and double-height voids to keep each room in contact with daylight. The courtyard and the back outbuilding remain intact, so the garden life that defines Godella's residential streets is not sacrificed to square meters.

The Interior Patio as Engine

The most consequential intervention is a new interior patio carved into the plan. The original house, like many postwar Valencian town houses, stacked rooms along one side of a long party wall, leaving only the front and rear facades to handle light and ventilation. That worked tolerably for shallow plans, but Baron39 needed depth. The new courtyard drops light into the center of the section and creates a cross-ventilation path that every floor benefits from.

It also generates the house's best spatial moment: standing inside, you look through timber-framed glass doors across the patio to the rough limestone wall on the opposite side, where a wicker chair sits under dappled shade. The courtyard is tiny, essentially a light well with ambitions, but it transforms the house from a corridor into a set of rooms arranged around an outdoor room.

Timber Takes the Lead

Walk through Baron39 and you are never more than a glance away from exposed timber structure. Ceiling joists, beams, stair treads, ladder stairs, and window frames are all visible and unclad, which gives the house a warmth that plaster-and-concrete renovations rarely achieve. The staircase with its open timber treads against white walls is the circulation spine, and it doubles as the primary expression of the construction system: you can read the house's skeleton in every flight.

One detail worth noting is the rope mesh safety net stretched between timber ceiling planes over a double-height void. It is a pragmatic solution for a house with children, but it also makes the vertical volume legible from below, turning the upper level into a hovering plane rather than a sealed lid. The mezzanine rooms with pine floors and exposed joists reinforce this quality of lightness within a structure that, from the street, reads as solid masonry.

Terracotta and Stone as Thermal Mass

Where timber handles span and structure, ceramics handle mass and climate. Terracotta floor tiles run through every ground-level room and out onto the courtyard, blurring the threshold between inside and outside. Ceramic blocks form the new load-bearing walls, providing the thermal inertia that a Mediterranean house needs to stay cool through Valencia's long summers. The detail of terracotta paving meeting the white rendered wall, with four circular weep holes visible at the base, is a small thing, but it tells you how seriously drainage and breathability were considered at every junction.

Rough limestone walls survive from the original structure and now serve as interior feature surfaces, their uneven texture a counterpoint to the precision of the new timber framing. The palette is deliberately limited: white plaster, warm wood, red-brown terracotta, grey stone. Nothing competes. Every material earns its place through performance as much as appearance.

Living Between Inside and Out

The ground floor day spaces operate as a sequence of thresholds. The kitchen, open and white-topped, sits beneath exposed timber beams and pendant lights. The dining space pushes through a stone wall frame toward the terrace. Timber-framed glass doors slide or fold to connect interior rooms directly to the existing rear courtyard, so on a warm evening the house effectively doubles in size. The terracotta floor running continuously from kitchen to patio is the simplest possible way to achieve this, and it works.

The Rear Courtyard and Pool

The existing backyard was kept and enriched rather than rebuilt. A small pool sits at the base of the courtyard, framed by a curved exterior staircase that climbs to a rooftop terrace. Climbing vines cascade over the stone and stucco walls, and a citrus tree provides canopy shade. At dusk, the pool reflects the lit interior visible through the glass doors, collapsing the distance between the domestic space and its outdoor extension.

Turquoise pool water meeting terracotta tile, vine leaves overhead: these are not designed effects so much as inevitable consequences of putting the right materials next to each other in the right climate. The courtyard reads as though it has been there for decades, which is perhaps the highest compliment you can pay a renovation in a district where the neighbors have been tending their gardens since the 1950s.

Upper Rooms and Mezzanines

Upstairs, the bedrooms and bathrooms occupy the expanded volume beneath the gabled roof. Rooms are compact, with timber-framed doors opening to exterior ironwork grilles that filter light without sacrificing privacy. The mezzanine spaces, small rooms with pine floors and safety netting at their edges, function as children's areas or flexible overflow zones. A bathroom finished in pale green tile with a timber floor and exposed ceiling joists shows the same material discipline as the rest of the house: ceramic where water demands it, wood everywhere else.

Plans and Drawings

The drawing set makes the project's economy legible. The site plan shows a single narrow plot within a dense urban block, confirming how little room there was to expand laterally. The three-level floor plans reveal the central courtyard as the organizing element around which every room orbits. Cross and longitudinal sections expose the double-height spaces, the varied roof angles, and the relationship between the pool level and the main living floor. Structural drawings lay bare the timber framing system across all levels, and the construction details at roof assembly connections show how laminated timber meets the existing masonry walls. A comparative overlay of the existing and proposed configurations is especially telling: the footprint barely changes, but the interior is completely reimagined.

Why This Project Matters

Baron39 House makes a quiet argument that the most sustainable renovation strategy is also the oldest one: use what the climate and the local building tradition already know. Wood and ceramics have been the materials of Valencian domestic architecture for centuries, not because builders lacked alternatives, but because they perform. Paco Oria Estudio's decision to minimize concrete and steel is not a gimmick; it is a recovery of intelligence that the construction industry spent decades forgetting.

The project also demonstrates that 150 m² can feel generous if you design the section rather than just the plan. By growing vertically, carving out an interior patio, and keeping the rear courtyard intact, the house achieves a richness of spatial experience that many houses twice its size never manage. In a moment when adaptive reuse is too often treated as a spectacle of exposed industrial bones, Baron39 offers something more useful: a current version of the Mediterranean town house, built with the materials it was always meant to have.

Baron39 House by Paco Oria Estudio, Godella, Spain. 150 m², completed 2021. Photography by Sieverscarregui.

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