The Buenos Aires neighborhood of Parque Chas is a labyrinth. A verdant series of concentric circles morphing into squares toward its outer edges, the area has a spoke-and-wheel layout that keeps taxi drivers out for fear of getting lost. Cars thundering along the surrounding avenues don’t bother trying to take the area’s lanes as shortcuts.

To Hernán Landolfo, it was perfect. The 39-year-old architect was living in a small house at the time, but when he and his partner, Lucía Gentile, had their daughter, Luisa, now four, they knew they would need more space. So, in 2018, they bought something larger in Parque Chas and moved in the following spring.

The space Hernán found was not one house, but two propiedades horizontales, where two 1950s brick homes butted up against each other. (PHs, as they’re known in Buenos Aires, are a common arrangement.) His family would have all the space they needed by simply combining the two. The challenge, then, was to join the existing structures with minimal intervention.

“In Buenos Aires they destroy old houses,” says Hernán. “It’s like the natural path of all these houses is to be knocked down and turned into three-story buildings. There was something nostalgic—I don’t know how to explain it—a little quixotic about, What can we do if we don’t touch it?”

The homes were typical of the ’50s, with brick construction, vaulted ceilings, wooden details, and mosaic-tile floors. Hernán painted the walls white and added simple, elegant furniture, lending the spaces a minimalist touch without obscuring the property’s historic look and feel. He installed steel-framed windows and doors at the front of the property and kept the original ones to use elsewhere in the home—a decision that was as much economic as aesthetic. He also kept the dusky-pink and gray-green harlequin tiles in the kitchen. The effect is as if eras are layered on top of each other.

“It’s richer when you add, or absorb, the variable of time,” says Hernán, surveying the mix of old and new in his kitchen. “It gives it its own personality.... Someonemade this place with love.”

To create a single residence, Hernánmade four openings in the thick internalwall dividing the two units. He also madea triangular cut in a wall in what used tobe one of the home’s kitchens but is nowLuisa’s playroom, allowing the family tomove between spaces more easily. For privacy, Hernán closed off the entry to thehome along the street and preserved theone to the house at the rear that’s accessedvia a side passage.

Parque Chas’s mazelike nature influenced the house’s redesign, he says. Theconcept of a labyrinth was doubly significant: As well as referring to the neighborhood’s tangled streets, it is the title of a short-story collection by famed Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. The house is on Ginebra Street (Spanish for Geneva, the city where Borges is buried).

“There’s something with the theme of the labyrinth that it was fun to see how it could permeate the work,” Hernán says. “The objective of the space is that at least the first time that someone comes in, they get lost.”

Placed across the property are patios that Hernán turned into gardens, with benches positioned in some for orchestrated views that make the spaces feel expansive. Along the right-hand wall of the property, Hernán installed a mirror. Open to the sky and reflecting the inner patio, it creates an illusion of extra room so effectively that friends have walked directly into it, according to Lucía.

“As I was making the house, I surrounded myself with images from books of beautiful gardens, and their influence poured through.”
—Hernán Landolfo, architect and resident

Adding greenery was the couple’s way of starting to make the space their own when permits for other parts of the work were stymied by the pandemic. During lockdown, Hernán took inspiration from the BBC show Gardeners’ World. “It was partly about bringing nature home, too,” adds Lucía. “When we arrived, all the patios were dry, and there wasn’t any kind of greenery.”

The property has two rooftop terraces, one for each original PH. They’re separated by a second-story laundry room, and when its windows are open, you can see through from one to the other. The couple have a grill on the front roof terrace, to which they have recently started inviting friends for asados (Argentina’s beloved barbecues). Here, the vines winding through the white metal fencing that Hernán installed above the house’s rampart- style front also give his family privacy from a block of taller apartments that overlooks their garden.

Not that it was meant as such, but Hernán’s family home is something of a statement in an area under siege by developers. “It’s a little nostalgic, to tell you the truth, because the city has to advance—you can’t stop the city,” he says. “Maybe it’s the romanticism of the lost cause. But, well, this will stay here for a while.”

Project Credits:

Architecture: Landolfo & Asociados (with assistance from Arquitecto Marcos Asa)

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An Architect Punches Through the Wall of Two ’50s Properties to Create His Family Home