It can feel trite to say that building a home is a labor of love. Yet for father and son Danilo and Lautaro Taranti, both of whom are architects, that platitude is the only way to describe their experience of creating a coastal retreat in Argentina about four hours south of Buenos Aires. The weekend getaway embodies their love of architecture as much as their admiration for each other, they say.

“I am so grateful to my father; he always gave me freedom and valued my point of view,” says Lautaro, the younger Taranti, who graduated from Buenos Aires’s Facultad de Arquitectura, Diseño y Urbanismo, four years ago. “We both have a great passion for our profession.” For his part, the older Taranti, who has been practicing architecture for thirty years, says his son has broadened his mind. “Whenever he wants to take a risk, I support him,” says Danilo. “He has really propelled the studio forward.”

The pair began designing the property, dubbed Casa H1, shortly after cofounding Taranti Arq in Buenos Aires in 2019, a relaunch of the studio that Danilo established in the early ’90s.

The entry leads into the volume with the common areas, and from there, a glass-enclosed “bridge” leads up to the bedrooms." layout="" credit="Add credit" photoUserId=""/>

Set in a resort area known as Costa Esmeralda, the house is ensconced in a densely forested quarter-acre plot near the sea. A desire to respect the plot’s tall pine trees drove many of the design choices made by the Tarantis: of exactly 67 pines, only three were cut down to make way for the 1,900-square-foot construction. Danilo and Lautaro landed on a plan of two rectangular volumes at slightly different elevations connected by a glass-enclosed bridge. Viewed from the sky, Casa H1 does indeed look like the letter H.

Beyond its complex yet austere geometry, what stands out about the home is the way it connects with the woods; walls of windows create tree-filled panoramas at the front and rear. There are trees so close to it, in fact, that when Danilo and Lautaro built a small wooden deck outside the main living area, they made cutouts to go around several trunks. Outside of the trees they cut down, the only place where the Tarantis reshaped the landscape is with the entry sequence between the two volumes. There, they planted local grasses to avoid having to walk on the sandy soil that surrounds the house.

With his designs, Lautaro often talks about sincerity. By this he means that he avoids interfering with the natural order of things as much as he can. For example, when choosing materials for the house, he stuck to the area’s most widely used building blocks: pine, eucalyptus, cement, and steel. He also chose to respect the uneven terrain, elevating the entire house some 10 feet from the ground’s lowest point and building it on steel piles.

To counter the dark green and brown hues of the forest, Lautaro and Danilo made the home’s surfaces very light by combining white paint with board-formed concrete and blond wood. In the morning, sunlight streams in through the east-facing volume, which has a 55-foot long glass wall fronting the home’s three bedrooms. The west-facing volume holding the common areas gets sun in the afternoon.

At night, the Tarantis, including Lautaro’s mother and often his sister and girlfriend, light a fire on a circular pit behind the house and sit around it on folding chairs. They talk about life, current events, and of course, architecture. “I’ve been building houses for a long time,” says Danilo. “This one was a win. To be living with the forest, it’s something else.”

Related Reading:

A Disused Historic Home in Argentina’s Cowboy Country Becomes a Young Family’s Rural Refuge

One of Argentina’s First Passive Houses Stands Tall Above Rising Tides

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: Taranti Arq / @tarantiarq

Lighting and Interior Design: Taranti Arq

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