“It’s as if the house is part of the natural scenery,” says Roberto Del Fierro, describing the new home in Araucanía, Chile, that he shares with his wife, María Elena, and their three sons, Tomás, Cristóbal, and Benjamín. “When we’re inside,” he says, “it feels like we’re out in the landscape.”

The Del Fierros live primarily in Santiago but escape to Araucanía whenever possible. There, the family thrives amid the mountains, volcanoes, deep green grasslands, and patches of dense woodland that surround the glassy surface of Lake Colico.

The house’s angled roofline mimics the wooded hillside behind it." layout="bleed" credit="Photo by Cristóbal Palma" photoUserId=""/>

But before Araucanía became a second home, it was a place where Roberto and María Elena sowed their dreams. “We camped at Lake Colico in the summer of 1991, when we were boyfriend and girlfriend,” Roberto says. “The landscape was startling, and the connection between us and the place was powerful—it’s where I decided I’d marry María Elena.” The couple married the next year, and afterward, they visited Araucanía often, at first alone and then with their sons. “We dreamed of having a house there one day,” says Roberto.

Eventually, the couple found and purchased a lot near the lake. Once they did, they called Aguilo + Pedraza Architects. “I saw a picture in the newspaper of a house they designed and thought, ‘This is the kind of house I want,’” says Roberto, who also knew the exact vistas he wanted to have from inside the house. “I thought about views of the lake and took pictures from the place on the site where I wanted to locate the house,” he says.

The home Diego Aguilo and Rodrigo Pedraza designed features a lake-facing north facade that’s clad almost entirely in glass. Besides harnessing sunlight that warms the house during the winter, the glass eliminates the feeling of being enclosed. “When we’re inside, we have the same incredible view from all the rooms,” Roberto says. “I can be in the kitchen cooking and have the same view that I have from my master bedroom.” And from the outside, the way the architects sited the house gives it the appearance of a natural feature that grew up and out of a fold in the topography. “The house looks like it’s emerging from the land,” Aguilo says. The glass-covered northern facade plays a role here, too—it showcases the way the home’s single level transitions to two levels, an incline that mimics the silhouette of the wooded hillside behind it.

Embedded into a slope, the western end of the house’s rectangular form hugs the practically flat part of the land, while the eastern end cantilevers over the slope’s descent. “We had the opportunity to use that slope and get more height for the house,” Aguilo says. “Where the slope goes down, that half of the house has two floors.” The architects placed the open-plan kitchen, dining, and living area in the western portion of the house, which is a voluminous single level. In the two-story eastern portion, they placed a master suite on the upper level and rooms for the boys on the lower level. “Looking down at the lake, the master bedroom has the feeling of being suspended because it’s above the trees and everything else,” Aguillo says.

While the glass of the north facade references the brilliant surface of the lake, the black-stained pine that wraps the south facade and the guesthouse was inspired by the color of the woods. “That black of the tree trunks and the green of the grass are a big part of the landscape,” Aguilo says.

Shop the Look

Aguilo and Pedraza outfitted the interior with raw pine walls, flooring, and ceilings. “It has only a clear coating because the pine is light in color, and we wanted a house that wasn’t dark,” Aguilo says. The architects put pine cabinetry in the kitchen and the bathrooms, too. “The counters are Caesarstone, but everything else is pine,” Aguilo says.

Like the Del Fierros, the architects are no strangers to Southern Chile’s dramatic landscape. “We do lots of work in the south,” Aguilo says. “And in the south, the landscape is very important. It’s so beautiful that it does at least fifty percent of the work—half of any project is already done when we design houses there.”

Aguilo’s perspective is what drew Roberto from the very beginning. “The architects understood that we wanted a house that connects to nature,” he says.

The house and the Araucanía landscape are where the family finds balance, recharges, and connects with nature, but it’s also where they connect with one another. “This is a very special place,” says Roberto. “It brings us together.”

Related Reading:

A Little Chilean Tree House That's One With the Canopy

An Unplugged Family Hideout Borders the Ocean in Chile

Just Getting to This Remote Patagonian Retreat Is an Adventure

Project Credits:

Architect: Aguilo + Pedraza Architects

Builder: Mauricio Urzua

Structural Engineer: Jaime Chaperon

Lighting Design: Aguilo + Pedraza Architects