Going against the current of souls who in the past decades have abandoned the villages of Navarre’s Lizoáin Valley to try their luck in big cities – a tendency that has become all the more pronounced all over Spain – a young couple contemplated the countryside as a boon, and decided it was the ideal place in which to raise a family. So it was that they settled on the edge of one of those towns, on a plot facing the cereal fields that in olden times fed and gave villagers a living.

In consonance with the surroundings, the dwelling is a simple volume built in the tradition of solid walls and tiled roofs that characterizes the neighboring farmhouses. A manipulation of the topography made it possible to organize the home on two floors: one at ground level for the shared rooms, and the other halfburied, for the bedrooms and a porch that opens out to a backyard and the peaceful, idyllic pre-Pyrenean landscape. An emancipatory vision that also translates into the desire for a self-sufficient house, which is equipped with a biomass boiler providing hot water and heating, a series of solar panels, and a tank that harnesses rainwater in a region of frequent wet weather.