Vergara Arquitectos Builds a Fragmented Coastal Citadel Around a Courtyard Street That Frames the Chilean Sea

Most coastal houses in Chile treat the ocean as a constant presence, stretching glazing along every facade so the Pacific fills each room. The Illapangui del Peumo House in Santo Domingo, by Vergara Arquitectos under lead architect Francisco Vergara Arthur, does the opposite. Completed in 2024 on a ravine above the Valparaíso Region coast, the 325 m² house for a large family splits into three gabled volumes and threads them along an open-air "courtyard street" that runs perpendicular to the horizon. The sea appears only where that street ends.

That decision to ration the view is what makes the house worth studying. It shifts the sea from backdrop to event, something you walk toward and reach. The house supports this with two other commitments: a structure and interior built largely from laurel and oak salvaged from a German-style house dating to around 1900, and a native boldo tree kept on site and set at the center of the public zone. The result reads less like a single villa and more like a small domestic settlement, which is how the architects describe it: a fragmented citadel.

The Courtyard Street and the Rationed Sea

The courtyard street is the organizing spine. Paved in stone and flanked by grey rendered walls and a charred timber screen, it reads as a public lane at domestic scale. At its far end a timber lintel crops the ocean into a single horizontal frame. You can see the logic: by holding the view behind solid walls for most of the walk, the architects give the opening real weight when you arrive.

We think this is the strongest move in the project. A brief that asked for a relationship with the sea that is "not constant" could easily have produced a compromise of a few strategic windows. Instead, Vergara Arquitectos made the withholding spatial and walkable. The horses wandering the paving in these photographs are staging, but they also make a fair point: this is an outdoor room that reads as a farmyard rather than a manicured patio.

Three Volumes, One Small Citadel

From above, the house breaks into distinct pieces: a public volume for shared living, a private volume where bedrooms gather around an interior courtyard, and a service volume. Dark standing-seam roofs and stucco walls tie them together, while stone retaining walls step the ensemble into the slope. Courtyards and circulation paths fill the gaps between buildings, so moving from bedroom to kitchen means stepping outside.

For a large family this fragmentation is practical as well as atmospheric. Separating private and public volumes gives sleeping quarters acoustic and social distance from the main gathering spaces, and the courtyards multiply the outdoor rooms the brief asked for. The trade-off is exposure to weather on every crossing, a price that seems acceptable on this stretch of coast but one that every reader adapting the typology should weigh.

Timber with a Past

The material story is unusually specific. Laurel and oak were dismantled from a century-old German-style house, transported, and reused in floors, ceilings, structure and furniture. Inside the public volume that history is plain to see: exposed beams, diagonal bracing, and a reclaimed wood counter that still carries the marks of earlier use.

Reuse at this scale is still rare in residential work, and it matters that the salvaged timber here does structural and spatial work rather than serving as wall cladding. The bracing patterns give the rooms their rhythm. When low sun rakes across the floor, the older wood reads as a second layer of time inside a new building, which suits a house meant to accommodate a family across generations.

Living Under the Trusses

The public volume holds living, dining and kitchen as one continuous room beneath open trusses. A reclaimed wood island anchors the kitchen end, and the pitched ceiling keeps the volume generous without making it cavernous. The covered terrace extends the same timber language outward, with posts and a plank ceiling framing rolling hills and a distant strip of ocean.

Note how the terrace treats the sea: present, but far and partial, sitting beyond fields rather than at the threshold. This is consistent with the courtyard street. The house keeps the Pacific at arm's length almost everywhere, saving the full encounter for one place.

Building Around the Boldo

A native boldo already grew on the site, and the architects kept it and set the public area around it. In the photographs, mature trees sit right against the glazed pavilion and in the gravel courtyards, lit at dusk by wall lights mounted on the stone walls and timber posts. The architecture yields to existing growth rather than clearing it for a cleaner plan.

The pavilion itself is the most open structure in the complex: slim columns, glazed walls, and a timber frame that lets the landscape pass through. Against the heavier rendered volumes it works as the citadel's lantern, the one place where enclosure gives way almost entirely.

Pergolas as Thresholds

Freestanding timber pergola frames stand in front of the glazed dining volume, marking the edge between house and open land without enclosing anything. They work as gateways, scaled to people and to horses, and they echo the crossed bracing visible through the glass behind. Small elements like these keep the fragmented plan readable, signaling where the domestic realm begins.

Plans and Drawings

The floor plan makes the logic explicit: a central stone-paved strip, a tree-filled terrace, living areas on one side and a bedroom wing on the other. The exploded axonometric lifts the timber roof structures off a walled plan bounded by a stone perimeter, which shows how much of the citadel's character comes from the ground-level walls. The sections and elevations trace the sequence of gabled rooms, glazed links and a taller pavilion, with the tree recurring as a vertical counterweight to the low roofs.

Why This Project Matters

The Illapangui del Peumo House shows that a view gains value when it is withheld. By organizing the plan around one axis perpendicular to the horizon, Vergara Arquitectos turns the ocean into a destination rather than wallpaper. That is a useful lesson for any coastal site where the reflex is to glaze everything toward the water.

Its second lesson concerns material and memory. Salvaging laurel and oak from a 1900 house and using it as structure, not decoration, connects the new building to an older tradition of craft while cutting the demand for new timber. Combined with the retained boldo and the village-like plan, the house argues that a large family home can be built by accumulating parts, rather than by inflating a single object.

Illapangui del Peumo House by Vergara Arquitectos (lead architect Francisco Vergara Arthur), Santo Domingo, Chile. Area: 325 m². Completed: 2024. Photography: Ignacio Infante.

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