Category: Single Family Residential
Architecture Project: Temozón Shelter.
Location: Lot 1 Private Temozón, Mérida, Yucatán.
Dimensions: Plot 600m2 Construction 420m2
Start date: January 2021.
Completion date: April 2022.
Design: R79
Architect in charge: Roberto Ramírez Pizarro.
Work Team: Alia Peraza Aguilar, Ramón Rivero Fernández, Gerardo Trejo López.
Construction: MAPRO Group / Roberto Arjona Ortiz.
Lighting: Light Style & CO / Iván Palmero Bojórquez.
Photography: Sergio Ríos Pech
Residence designed as a refuge for an elderly woman, whose only child has left the nest. This home resolves most of the program on the ground floor, seeking a very practical operation with short distances and minimal effort. The house is conceived as a large terrace, exploring the idea that, despite being small spaces divided among themselves, this only happens on one side, removing the “lids” that look outwards on the other faces, achieving a continuous view towards the different gardens, merging the inside and outside, blurring the dividing line, creating a single fluid, continuous space, with a certain flavor of informality, like hanging a hammock outside and enjoying the breeze.
As the first house in the development, it was decided as a formal proposal to make it a Pivot, setting back the only two-level volume (located at the intersection of both coordinates) and leaving with this a clear gesture towards the street, a plaza that collects pedestrians and that with its apparent emptiness celebrates the corner.
The ground floor presents an L-shaped scheme, where on one side the social areas (dining room, kitchen, terrace) face the garden, and on the other, the private areas (family room, guest bedroom with closet/bathroom and at the back the master bedroom with a large dressing room and a comfortable and atypical bathroom) flanked by a circulation (that faces the garden) and a vegetal cushion that isolates us from the street. The articulator of these two perpendicular bands is the entrance hall, as the house lacks a living room. The services are concentrated on the upper floor, where those who support the daily tasks, the storage room, the laundry and drying room are located. On the ground floor, a block complements these “servers.”
The material palette is very simple and provides an easy reading of the programmatic content of the volumes. Thus, Pebble Stone is used for the blocks that house services. Floating slabs in white stucco delimit the private spaces, and cantilevers in Steel and Wood confine and emphasize the social areas. To evidence the terrace character of the house, large glass openings with opening systems, both sliding and folding, are repeated throughout the ground floor, giving versatility to the spaces to open to the outside or allow for their air conditioning.