Project: House “Lago en el cielo”
Architects: David Ramírez Arquitectos
Location: Retiro, Colombia
Area: 3,788 sf
Photographs by: Camilo Duque
House Lago en el Cielo by David Ramirez Arquitectos
David Ramírez Arquitectos has designed the House “Lago en el cielo” – a contemporary single family housing project located in the area of Retiro, about a 30 minute drive away from Medelin, Colombia. This beautiful dwelling is placed on a lush plot surrounded by fantastic natural landscapes that offer epic views that stretch all the way over to the La Fe dam.
The house ¨Lago en el cielo¨ is a single family housing Project, located less than 30 minutes from Medellin, Colombia. This house, projected in two levels lets you enjoy a privileged view over La Fe dam, and its location on the land was conceived to allow you to be in touch with nature.
When you reach the premises, you don´t see the house immediately, you have to search for it, in part, part because the landscape distracts and in part because it is clinging to the mountain, and it is like if the house wanted to see without being seen.
At first instance, you recognize from outside an orthogonal volumetry with a moderate proportion and quite façade. Its skin veneered with precast concrete similar to the blackboard. Density is balanced with big glass windows and super imposing volumes that bring lightness.
The main entrance to the house is through the upper level where a solid teka pivoted door opens to a large hall, next to the main lounge that shares an open kitchen, dining room and guest bathroom. In this same level the house has a bedroom with a bathroom and walk-in wardrobe. All space enjoys the visual characteristic that gets impressive as you go through the big glass doors, to the upper level terrace.
Access to the lower level is through a hallway with special lighting, rhythm and proportion characteristics that invite you to walk down. The way to the lower level is guided by the light that enters through oversized openings that play in a rhythm of verticality and join the visitor to reach the visual of a huge glass window same as the others in proportions but bigger that frames part of the work: outside vegetation.
Each one of the openings that seen from outside are a part of the building, now seen from inside provide a static furniture, with ashlars, jambs and lintels with the same depth. A convenient seating height invites you to stay and have a conversation or read a good book from the library below the frames.
The main bedroom almost unseen in the lower level is generously endowed with sliding windows that hide embedded in the walls that serve as pockets and when open the bedroom claims its own private terrace pierced by a native tree, original inhabitant of the land.
A textured wall with rolling stone the San Andres type, separates the bedroom and bathroom that includes a great window from floor to ceiling, it is another place of the house that dumps the pleasure of the sentences: having a bath under the natural light.
The house interior is well relaxed, with common materials such as wood, stones, cement. Furnished with some classics like Barcelona chair, the Eames Lounge chair or the chaise lounge LC4 that honored the heritage of modern architecture and names like Mies Vander Rohe or Le Corbusier.
External image had its moment in the project but it was not all, it was more the internal result of spaces and routes made for human activities as well as the materials and coatings drawing together the overall volumetric.
