Retina House

Retina House

Arnau estudi 


Located outside the walls of Santa Pau, a village and municipality in the Catalonian province of Girona, in eastern Spain, the Retina House is a family refuge that offers magnificent views, as its very optical name suggests. A place for the enjoyment of nature and simple things. Its relationship with the surroundings – which is experienced by the residents as a visual relationship – is the result of manipulating the abrupt topography of the site to form a rigorous horizontal plane on which is posed a no less rigorous prismatic volume containing within it all of the domestic functions, from the living room area to the bedroom by way of the dining room, the kitchen, the bathrooms, and the storage areas. A heavy concrete wall that resembles a powerful stone ashlar in its texture serves to seal the volume on all sides except the one that looks toward the landscape, where large wooden doors can sometimes be opened like eyelids to serve as parasols, and at other times closed to turn the dwelling into a poetic geometrical capsule set amid the natural landscape.