A stone façade for a day centre that pays tribute to the rural environment

Gondomar is a traditional village in Pontevedra. Many people from the nearby city of Vigo have their country homes there because it is welcoming, beautiful, and peaceful. Aware of the charm of their village, the Misioneras de María Mediadora chose it for their 'Madre Rosario Day Centre', located in a rural setting on a fully landscaped plot of over 20,000 m2, shared with the San José Nursery in the parish of Borreiros.

The project aims to provide the centre with an exterior skin connected to the landscape, durable and understated. To achieve this, the ventilated façades are entirely clad with Scalea Silvestre Moreno, a fine-grained natural stone that combines a greyish base with small dark specks. This granulated texture requires meticulous installation: the pieces are placed in very rectilinear modules, with minimal joints, maintaining the desired flatness in the prisms that shape the building's volume.

“We worked with pieces placed using the 'matacorte' technique, imitating the traditional placement of ashlar but adapted to contemporary methods. The aim was to maintain very flat, neutral, and coherent façades, without unnecessary ornamental elements,” explains the architect.

The 30 mm thick pieces were fixed using a ventilated façade system with continuous horizontal profiles, whose tabs are concealed in the grooves made on the upper and lower edges. The fine grain of this type of granite provides greater compactness and homogeneity, allowing for cleaner machining and grooving. This, combined with the layout prioritising the horizontal continuity of the joints, facilitates easier installation with this system, commonly used in ventilated façades of natural stone.

The ventilated façade construction solution also improves the building's efficiency and thermal comfort, as the air chamber behind the stone cladding minimises the risks associated with moisture, which is particularly relevant in Galicia's humid climate. The ventilated façade profiles also make it easier to address overhangs or extensions of the cladding, junctions, and façade details, ensuring perfect alignment and clean volumetric interplay.

In contrast to the stone envelope, the centre's interior chapel is clad with Dekton Sabbia, introduced into the project as an ultra-compact surface material with a more nuanced colour language. Dekton Sabbia features veins that run through each piece in a random and 'colourful' manner, reinterpreting Italian travertine with a chromatic recoding that offers visual richness and advanced durability.

This aligned veining, full of nuances, ensures the surface is not monotonous, making it ideal for spaces of reflection where both aesthetics and functionality are required. The use of Dekton Sabbia in the chapel provides a homogeneous texture suitable for a place of worship: clean, stable, resistant to ageing, and frequent use.

During the construction, the project relied on the quality of the material and technical support: advice during the design phase allowed for optimised dimensions and junction details, adjusting the pieces to setbacks, windows, and overhangs without forcing transitions between materials. In the chapel, Dekton Sabbia ensures uniform stain resistance, colour stability under light, and ease of maintenance, while on the façade, Scalea provides the nobility and texture of stone material without requiring excessive treatments.

The articulation between both materials is seamless. On the exterior, the natural stone Scalea shapes the building's personality; on the interior, Dekton Sabbia enhances this intention by providing a technical surface with a neutral yet rich finish. The building thus coherently meets two distinct requirements: the envelope must withstand external conditions (humidity, climate changes, radiation), while the chapel must offer a serene, clean, and durable environment without compromising the material's texture.