On one quiet street in Barracas in Buenos Aires, a neighborhood characterized by old-school stores and bazaars, stands an unmarked gray wall. It’s the last vestige of a home that once was: a modest single-story dwelling from the 1940s demolished to make way for another. The new home is a collaboration between architecture firm La Base and modular construction company Place, led by Leandro Seoane. Seoane, who lives in an adjacent building, wanted to create a home for his mother, Elena.

Joining forces with Seoane was one of the fortuitous things to come out of the pandemic for La Base founders Teresa Sarmiento and Nicolás Tovo, as they searched for faster and more efficient ways to build. Five years later they now have an impressive roster of projects under their belt, including an entirely modular project in Bariloche, previously published by Dwell.

“We started to think about how we could combine our strengths—our architectural expertise with their modular construction experience—to make architectural products using the kind of architecture we’d already been doing for twenty years,” says Sarmiento. The materials and language La Base uses, including metal, wood, and slender structural elements, were a natural fit with modular construction, she adds. “Today, around eighty or ninety percent of our projects are modular.”

Elena wanted a one-level home, feeling it would suit her best at this later stage in life in terms of comfort and affordability. The challenge for La Base—which the studio put on itself to achieve as high-quality of a home as possible while saving on costs—was producing a 775-square-foot plan that was half modular, half traditionally built, with the two parts joined seamlessly. They also wanted to merge indoor and outdoor spaces while offering privacy in a dense urban setting, a hallmark of the firm’s work.

Sarmiento describes the contrast of stepping into the house as theatrical. From the street, there is nothing to suggest the presence of what lies within. Through that gray wall is a patio with a jungle of vibrant green ferns. Iron stairs lead one way up to a paved terrace, while a solid lapacho wood door leads into the part of the house constructed in situ. An open-plan living and dining area connect with another patio at the rear through a sliding glass door framed in black aluminum.

According to Teresa, the idea was to concentrate all the most complex aspects of construction within the modular part, which was hoisted in by crane. “With modular construction, everything must be fully defined before production begins, almost like designing a car,” she explains. “Combining modular and traditional construction helped us control costs.” Due to logistics, finishes, and the quality Sarmiento and Tovo aim for, modular construction tends to be slightly more expensive than traditional methods. But in this case, building partly on-site helped offset expenses, and by minimizing masonry work, it ended up being yet more economical.

The prefabricated part of the home is a roughly 32-by-130-foot module containing a kitchen, a bathroom, and two bedrooms, all of which encloses another patio. Some elements were salvaged from the original property, including marble from the fireplace, repurposed cleverly to create a serene countertop in the bathroom. Slender wooden floorboards were stripped down and recycled as wooden cladding for the kitchen.

Elena, who has now been living in the house for two years, is thrilled with the results. “My home is my favorite place because it’s warm, comfortable, and functional. I love the amount of natural light that floods every corner, but what makes it truly special is the greenery in the outdoor spaces which connects me with nature,” she adds. She keeps a garden on the terrace, and uses one of the bedrooms as a study.

Work on the project began in March 2023 and by July Elena had already moved in. “It would have been earlier,” she laughs, “but there was a delay with the gas installation, and it being winter, I thought it best to wait.”

“For us, Casa Elena is a success story,” enthuses Sarmiento. “A true fusion of two very different worlds that ultimately enhance one another. That was our original challenge: to ensure that what prevails is not the construction method, but the architecture itself—the space, the light, the landscape, and the experience of living within it.”

More from La Base:

Two Architects Create a “Living Example” of Why Prefab Works So Well in the Wild

In Buenos Aires, a Family’s Experimental Renovation Tests the Boundaries of a Busy Street Corner

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: La Base / @labase__studio + @labase__arquitectura

Furniture Design: La Base / @labase__bcn

Builder: Place / @place_houses

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A Sanctuary of a Home Hides Behind This Gray Wall in the Middle of Buenos Aires