This bright white wedge-shaped house by Spanish studio Fran Silvestre Arquitectos thrusts out from the rock face behind it in the valley town of Ayora, near Valencia (+ slideshow).
The angled roof mirrors the slope of the surrounding ground, creating triangular elevations on the sides of the three-storey building.
Large panels slide across windows on the front and side of the house to maintain privacy for bedrooms on the middle floor.
The top floor is twice the size of the floors below and contains a third bedroom, as well as a living room that opens out onto a secluded courtyard.
See more Spanish houses on Dezeen »
Photography is by Fernando Alda and Juan Rodríguez.
Here's some text from the architects:
House on Mountainside Overlooked by Castle
Ayora, Valencia
The building is located in a landscape of unique beauty, the result of a natural and evident growth.
The mountain, topped by a castle, is covered by a blanket housing through a system of aggregation by simple juxtaposition of pieces generated fragmented target tissue that adapts to the topography.
The project proposes to integrate into the environment, respecting their strategies of adaptation to the environment and materials away from the mimesis that would lead to misleading historicism, and showing the time constructively to meet the requirements of the "new people."
In this way the house is conceived as a piece placed on the ground, joining in the gap.
A piece built on the same white lime, the same primacy of the massif on the opening, which takes the edge of the site to have their holes and integrated into the fragmentation of the environment.
The indoor space is divided by the void that is the core of communication cut parallel disposition of the mountain without touching it.
On the ground floor are the garage and cellar, on a volume it has two floors with four rooms.
Two of them, the rooms at the intermediate level are open to the private street, the other two on the upper level overlook above the houses opposite, the Valley of Ayora.
One of them, the study is opened in turn to the central double height, incorporating it into their space.
Across the gap, and on the mountain, are the areas facing the garden day illuminated by light reflected on the south slope of the castle oxidized.
Architecture: Fran Silvestre Arquitectos
Project Architect: Fran Silvestre, Maria José Sáez
Project Team: Fran Silvestre - Project Architect
María José Sáez - Project Architect
Ángel Ruíz - Architect collaborator
Building Engineer: Pedro Vicente López
Interior Design: ALFARO HOFMANN
Contractor: Cooperativa Montemayor
Location: Ayora. Valencia
Site Area: 477,06 m2
Built Area: 230,00 m2
Great project, and really astounding renderings! It is hard these days to discern what is built and not, this is NOT actually built.
Hi Andreas, please see the photography credits, the project is built!
Amy/Dezeen
Amy is right. This has been built for a while now and the best house I’ve ever seen! Le Corb eat your heart out! Bravo!
Nice but too claustrophobic for me.
Spectacular sculptural white house! It’s a really nice object.
“Stijloefening” as we might say in Belgium. A formalistic box in such a complex environment!
An incredible house. Beautiful object of design and art. My only issue is the environment it’s in. The colour of the houses and rocks do not fit in well with white. The environment the lacks the contrast needed to really have this house pop out of an area rather than as a singular object.
I love the exterior, the shape, the relationship with surroundings. I do like also the atrium with staircases, but the layout of the rooms, especially the bedrooms, seems not very successful, a bit too modest for such a project. At least on the basis of the drawings I can check out here.
This house is astoundingly beautiful! The contemporary architecture of Spain and Portuguese is so wonderful. A marvelous project.
Nice prison to live in.
It may be considered as an interesting sculpture but as a house to live in, it only celebrates solitary confinement, suitable maybe for robots.
Whatever happened to colours tastefully used, reflecting the complexities of human experience? The joys of memories from casual gatherings. We are fast approaching ‘laboratory’ architecture, void of feelings other than self containment.
Although beautiful, it feels like you are not allowed to have any belongings.
This is an architect’s play-thing, not a house.