Tololo Ugarte Sets a Black Barrel-Vaulted Cabin Among Wild Grasses and 300-Year-Old Trees in Limache, Chile

Catalejo is Spanish for spyglass, and the name explains this small house better than any diagram. On a stretch of open pasture outside Limache, Chile, Santiago-based studio Tololo Ugarte, led by Cristóbal Ugarte, has built an 80 m² cabin. It is a single black barrel vault with glazed ends and a scatter of round windows. The house was completed in 2024. Its starting point was not a program or a view corridor. It began with a small grove of four trees, each more than 300 years old, that stood out the first time the architect walked the land.

What interests us is how little the house tries to compete with that grove, or with the field around it. The pasture changes a great deal through the year: dry and almost desert-like in summer, then thick with tall grasses and weeds in winter and spring. The ground itself is flat, but the vegetation gives it a shifting, irregular relief. Catalejo is designed for that fluctuation. It reads less as an object placed on a site and more as an instrument for looking at one, a dark tube floating in the grass that points its lenses at what was already there.

A Dark Tube in a Shifting Field

From outside, the house reduces to almost nothing: a barrel vault in black corrugated sheet and dark slats, with a timber doorway and a circular opening cut into the skin. The color choice matters. A pale cabin would sit on the meadow as a figure. This one recedes into the shadows of the eucalyptus and the depth of the grass, and the openings become the only legible features.

Look at the photographs across seasons and the building's height seems to change. When the grasses are tall, the vault sinks into them. When the field dries out, the full profile shows. Few houses this small are this honest about being part of a landscape that refuses to hold still.

The Arched Ends as Lenses

The gable ends do the heavy lifting. Each is a fully glazed arch in a timber frame that follows the curve of the vault. Seen through ferns or across the pond, they turn the interior into a lit section: loft ladder, bookshelves, an orange lamp, all readable from outside. The spyglass metaphor works in both directions here. The house looks out, and the landscape looks in.

We appreciate that the arch is not decorative. It is simply the vault's profile left open, so the structural logic and the framing device are the same gesture. That economy is what keeps a small house from feeling over-designed.

Living Under a Plywood Vault

Inside, the black shell gives way to a continuous plywood lining that wraps walls and ceiling in a single warm surface. The living room sits at one glazed end, with a wood stove, cowhide rugs and a round window punched into the side wall. Afternoon sun falls along the curve and turns the whole interior amber.

The contrast between the dark exterior and the honey-toned interior is the oldest trick in cabin design, and it still works because it is well proportioned here. The vault is tight enough to feel sheltering and long enough to frame the garden at its end like the far lens of a telescope. The woven bamboo blind adds a filtered layer for days when the full view is too much.

A Loft Inside the Curve

A steel ladder leads to an upper level tucked into the crown of the vault. Up there the ceiling curves close overhead, and the room becomes a reading nook, a lounge and a sleeping loft with floor beds. An arched window at the end opens toward vineyards and mountains. The view down from the loft into the living space shows how the section works: one volume, two heights, a constant line of sight.

This is where 80 m² starts to feel generous. Instead of more walls, the house gains a second way of occupying the same curve. Lying on a floor bed under plywood, with the mountains framed at the gable, is about as direct an experience of the spyglass idea as the project offers.

Round Windows and Small Apertures

The circular and oval windows are the project's punctuation. Cut into plywood on the inside and slatted cladding on the outside, they frame single things: a mountain, a branch, a vase of white flowers seen from the garden at dusk. They do not give panoramas; the glazed ends handle that. They give fragments, and that discipline makes them more effective.

There is a playful quality here that we welcome in rural house design, which can get self-serious about views. A porthole next to a leather chaise, catching raking light, invites you to look at one thing for a long time.

Compact Domestic Machinery

The service spaces are handled with restraint. The kitchen and dining area share the vault with the living room, under a paper pendant. A timber counter with sink, gas hob and a window onto the fields keeps cooking connected to the outside. The bathroom continues the plywood lining with a floating vanity and vessel basin, so it reads as part of the same shell rather than a wet box inserted into it.

Nothing here is precious, and that is the point. The material palette is limited enough that the furniture, rugs and objects carry the domestic warmth, and the architecture stays in the background.

Sleeping, Fire and the Seasons

The bedroom gets a floor-to-ceiling glass wall that opens straight onto the meadow, with pines and a distant peak beyond. At dusk the mood flips: the stove burns inside, a fire burns in the garden, and the round window frames dark trees. The house seems built for that shift between an open summer pavilion and a winter refuge.

Small vignettes, like a woven-seat armchair beside a stack of books at the foot of the ladder, suggest a house meant for slow occupation rather than display. That fits a site whose main event is the passage of the seasons through a field.

Plans and Drawings

The plans confirm the linear logic: bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, dining and living strung along a narrow bar, flanked by decks and drawn under the canopy of the trees. The second plan is the more revealing one. Here the bedroom end opens up as a sleeping porch with three daybeds, which suggests the house can loosen its enclosure in warmer months.

The sections show the loft ladder and the stacked occupation of the vault. The elevations draw the large old trees at almost the same weight as the building, an honest expression of the hierarchy the architect set from the first site visit.

Why This Project Matters

Catalejo shows how a very small house can take a clear position on its site without heroic gestures. Tololo Ugarte reads the land first: four centuries-old trees and a field that swings between drought and overgrowth. The design answers with a form that is easy to recognize and yet lets the landscape do most of the work. The barrel vault, the glazed arches and the round windows are a short vocabulary, used with conviction.

For anyone designing in rural settings, the lesson is about framing over spectacle. A house does not need to command a panorama to feel connected to a place. It can choose what to look at, how closely and in which season. At 80 m², Catalejo makes that case more persuasively than many houses several times its size.

Catalejo by Tololo Ugarte (Cristóbal Ugarte), Limache, Chile. Area: 80 m². Completed: 2024. Photography: Mauricio Duarte Arratia.

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