Pablo Bris Marino Builds Two Self-Built Homes on a Spanish Hillside for Under €1200 per Square Meter

Architecture that costs half its initial budget estimate and still delivers a coherent, thermally efficient result deserves scrutiny. The House for Two Brothers, completed in 2024 by Pablo Bris Marino in Colmenar de Oreja near Aranjuez, is a pair of independent residences on a roughly 1000-square-meter plot that drops five meters between its short sides. One house is a compact apartment for a single occupant; the other is a two-bedroom unit for a couple and their daughter. They share a swimming pool, a storage room, and a conviction that architecture does not require a conventional construction company to be worth taking seriously.

What makes this project genuinely interesting is not just the price tag but the method. The homes were built primarily by an unemployed formworker and the homeowner himself, who had no prior construction experience. That DIY reality is legible in the finished product: exposed load-bearing walls, corrugated metal cladding, and details that privilege directness over polish. The result is architecture that earns its roughness. It is not a polished rendering come to life; it is a building shaped by the hands and limits of the people who made it, and that candor gives it more character than most developer-driven housing manages to achieve.

Stepping Into the Slope

The rectangular plot, roughly 23 by 40 meters, presented a topographic challenge that the design turns into its primary spatial strategy. Rather than leveling the site, a drastic and expensive operation, Bris Marino steps the two volumes down the grade, using terraces at different levels to absorb the five-meter drop. The street-facing facade on Calle Almonte reads as a modest, almost industrial composition: a concrete plinth topped by white corrugated metal, with a bamboo-screened balcony and a gated entry set into a concrete wall. From this side, the building is deliberately understated, giving nothing away about the landscape that opens up behind it.

The narrow side passage between the building and the sloped embankment reveals the pragmatic infrastructure that makes the project work: exposed drainage, compacted earth, and the honest mechanics of a structure negotiating gravity on a budget. It is not glamorous, but it is legible and functional.

Terraces as Primary Living Space

One of the boldest decisions in the project is the allocation of area: the terraces have a greater constructed surface than the dwellings themselves. This is a house designed around the conviction that in central Spain's climate, outdoor space is not supplementary but essential. Timber-slatted pergolas on steel columns create shaded zones that extend living into the open air, while the swimming pool acts as a shared amenity that anchors the lower terrace level.

The orientation is calculated. The plot's south and east exposures are where the views lie, with the Tajo River stretching across the distant landscape. Terraces and covered patios are arranged to capture these sightlines, and the pergola sequences create a layered threshold between interior comfort and the panoramic horizon. Woven chairs, gravel surfaces, and cane privacy screens keep the palette raw and maintenance-friendly, consistent with the self-built ethos.

A View Worth Building For

The covered terrace overlooking tiled rooftops and hillside vegetation is the project's most compelling image. Three figures sit beneath a timber pergola, the landscape unfolding in layers: tile roofs, green canopy, distant hills. The architecture recedes here, serving as a frame rather than a subject. The gabled roof overhang with its exposed rafters, photographed at dusk, reveals the structural logic of the angled roofline as it reaches toward the valley. These are not decorative gestures; the deep overhangs manage solar gain while channeling views southward.

Honest Interiors and a Ventilated Envelope

Inside, load-bearing walls are left exposed, painted white to brighten compact rooms and eliminate the cost of applied finishes. Timber ceilings add warmth without pretension. Full-height glazing opens the living spaces to the terraces, collapsing the boundary between inside and out. The interiors are spare but considered: potted plants on sills, concrete surfaces left unadorned, and a material honesty that reads as intentional rather than incomplete.

The thermal strategy is simple and effective. A cold roof and ventilated facade, both clad in white sheet metal chosen for its reflective properties, minimize heat absorption in summer. Thermal bridges are carefully minimized across the envelope. In winter, a single pellet stove heats each unit, a claim that speaks to the quality of the insulation rather than to any austerity of ambition. ROCKWOOL insulation and Termiglass glazing contribute to an envelope that is easy to heat and slow to overheat, a passive approach suited to the continental extremes of the Tajo valley.

The White Metal Shell

The corrugated metal cladding that wraps the facades and roof is the building's most visible material choice, and it is worth dwelling on. White sheet metal is cheap, lightweight, reflective, and fast to install, all qualities that align with a self-built timeline and budget. Vertical window slots punched through the metal skin provide ventilation and daylight without compromising the thermal envelope, while rooftop vents allow the ventilated roof cavity to exhaust hot air passively. The material's industrial associations are offset by the domestic scale of the building and the warmth of the timber pergolas below.

Corrugated metal roller shutters, deployed horizontally, offer additional solar control on specific openings. These are not elegant brise-soleils; they are hardware-store solutions deployed with architectural intent. The gabled roof, rising above the hillside neighborhood at dusk, reads as a clean geometric presence against the sky, its simplicity a product of economy rather than minimalist ideology.

Plans and Drawings

The site plans confirm the spatial logic: two rectangular volumes set within a perimeter of tree canopies, courtyards, and the pool occupying the interstitial zone between them. The floor plan makes the independence of the two dwellings clear, each with its own entrance, its own terrace sequence, and its own relationship to the slope. The sections are where the project's intelligence is most apparent, revealing how the angled roof follows the descending terrain and how interior levels step down to maintain contact with the ground at each terrace. Construction detail drawings, including sloped roof sections with column connections, demonstrate a level of technical resolution that belies the project's DIY construction narrative. The elevation studies, showing modular panel arrangements across east and west faces, confirm the systematic approach to the corrugated cladding.

Why This Project Matters

The House for Two Brothers matters because it confronts a question that most architecture publications prefer to aestheticize rather than answer: what does it actually cost to build well? At roughly €1200 per square meter, including a pool and landscaping, Bris Marino's project arrives at roughly 60% of the initial professional estimate. The savings came not from cutting corners on thermal performance or spatial quality, but from eliminating the markup of general contractors and subcontractors. An unemployed formworker and a homeowner with no construction experience built it over four years. The imperfections are real, but so is the house.

More broadly, the project challenges the assumption that self-building is incompatible with architectural ambition. The terraces that exceed the interior area, the ventilated envelope tuned to continental Spanish climate extremes, the careful orientation toward the Tajo River valley: these are design decisions, not compromises. In a housing market that increasingly prices out the people it claims to serve, a project that proves owner-built construction can produce dignified, climate-responsive architecture for two families on a shared plot is not just noteworthy. It is necessary.

House for Two Brothers by Pablo Bris Marino. Colmenar de Oreja, Spain. 148.54 m² (1593 sq ft). Completed 2024. Photographs by Pablo Bris Marino.

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Pablo Bris Marino

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