Casa Felicità Mare - Family Housing

The challenge of this project was to renovate an existing house to accommodate new forms of living, expanding it with additional constructions, and establishing modes of intervention where the main continuities between all the elements are given by the articulation of semi-covered spaces harmoniously integrated into the landscape.

The original house, a compact two-story block arranged on the ravine facing the sea, was built in the 1990s when the Uruguayan town of José Ignacio, east of Punta del Este, was changing from a fishing village to an exclusive 25-block beach resort. The current intervention expands and opens the house towards this privileged natural environment, extending especially the first floor level into a large semi-covered area complemented by a new pavilion, with exceptional sunset views over the fishing port.

The existing construction of brick walls with colonial tile roofs formed a traditional tectonic volume, surrounded by some perimeter galleries. The material renovation, 25 years later, intervenes in this dominant wall definition with an assembly of new technologies: concrete structures, stone walls, pergolas and natural lapacho wood cladding that will become grayer over time, forming more open and screened boundaries, of variable behavior, contained between the plane of the semi-covered first floor and a homogeneous stone floor that materializes the continuity between interior and exterior.

The project maintains the original distribution criteria, with an upper floor for the private bedroom area at the level of the vehicular access street, and a first floor with the public areas and terraces linked to sports and leisure spaces. The new intervention seeks continuity with the existing one by means of a slab that joins the original volume and wraps the complex with a perimeter beam as a ribbon. A system of pergolas and wooden constructions complete the sun protection to the west on the upper floor and cover the access from the street. The stone walls act as large plinths to support the ground from the beach, continuing to the opposite front as a flower bed and retaining wall.

The interior-exterior limit is regulated by the total opening of the carpentry, generating large spaces for use in summer, when the house is occupied for parties and vacations. The links from the beach to the pool, terraces, galleries and living areas, and then to the bedroom areas upstairs are conceived as gradual transitions that define very different forms of privacy, but at the same time recovering in each instance a way of associating with the landscape through views and semi-covered expansions.

The project investigates the opportunity to transform and expand an existing traditional building to associate itself decisively with the landscape.
The addition of a modern pavilion is integrated through a large slab that extends in the form of galleries and terraces. This structural linking element synthesizes the expression of the new intervention in the ensemble, where the orange tile roofs, wooden pergolas and shutters, and other elements are linked by this linear, pure and white piece. The edges open to views and ventilation, and the projection of shadows define both the transitions between new and existing constructions as well as a linking architecture between exteriors and interiors to give shape to a unique way of living by the sea.