Spanish architecture firm Fran Silvestre Arquitectos has completed its new white volume-shifting house between the pine forest of Spain. Located in Paterna, in an arid Mediterranean climate of Valencia, the new residential house was converted from the original house by keeping its structure as original. 

Fran Silvestre added a new material quality and identity to the house by playing with interior spaces, sizes, heights and volumes in order to get a perfect and pure form even if he keeps the house much more simplistic, modest and contemporary with elegance look.

''Twenty-one plateaus and seven volumes tell the story of this house,'' says Fran Silvestre, founder and principal architect of Fran Silvestre Arquitectos.

The aim of the project is based on a new and even identity to a house belonging to the same family for several generations. The original house formed by the aggregation of different interventions at different times, with different construction systems. Each of the rooms in the house describes a moment in life of this family story. Thus, it was essential to maintain the structure, spaces, uses, garden and memories, presenting them in a new way.

The further layer built in the history of this place employs new volumes used for new parts of the program. In this way leisure areas are projected, containing always the scale of the building and are presented as a sort of aggregation of small parts, which draws courtyards and narrows areas, as the traditional Mediterranean architecture does.

The interior respects the intermediate levels system producing a large spatial heterogeneity in rooms with a wide variety of sizes and heights. The supporting structure of the original house is housed inside the furniture that has the same gray shade as the trunks of some of the species that inhabit the garden.

The house is woven both among the trees and among the good memories that live in this pine forest.

General floor

Ground floor

Main floor

Roof plan

Ground floor-previous state

Main floor-previous state

Sections

Model

Project Facts

Project name: House Between The Pine Forest

Architect: Fran Silvestre Arquitectos

Location: Paterne, Valencia, Spain

Interior design: Alfaro Hofmann

Project team: Fran Silvestre (Principal in Charge), María Masià, Estefanía Soriano, Fran Ayala, Ángel Fito, Pablo Camarasa, Sandra Insa, Santi Dueña, Ricardo Candela, David Sastre, Sevak Asatrián, Paloma Márquez, Eduardo Sancho, Esther Sanchís, Vicente Picó, Erika Angulo, Alba Monfort, Ruben March, Álvaro Olivares.

Structural engineer: Josep Ramón Solé, Windmill

Building engineer: Carlos García

Site area: 3106, 52 m2

Built area: 722.32 m2

All images © Fernando Guerra 

All models & drawings © Fran Silvestre Arquitectos 

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