El Garaje

An automobile repair shop becomes a home where a sequence of parallel walls makes hallways unnecesary and is conducive to the crossing of paths

The new home is designed as a connected collection of rooms: it has no corridor but relies on two central spaces housing the kitchen and the dining room, acting as the heart of the house. The house is an experiment of the possibilities of organizing a contemporary typology based on an additive system of rooms of similar proportions, where function does not dominate the design. The threshold space works as an anteroom to the kitchen.

Both energy saving and natural lighting determined the construction solutions applied, from partitions executed with ceramic bricks to replacing the industrial door with translucent glass blocks. In place of the old garage door, there is now a galvanized door in a blue frame and glass bricks. Two additional openings are inserted in the brick facade for additional light and ventilation. This palette of materials indicates what will happen on the inside.