The notary's home

R31, the Notary's home. A project by Viraje Arquitectura that revolves around the preservation of its roof.

The renovation project, carried out by the Valencian architecture studio Viraje, has given rise to a more modern conception of this 1970s home. The aim is to move away from the dark tones of the interior of the building and bring light and warmth to all the rooms in the house. However, work has been carried out in a way that the unique wooden roof remains intact and takes on greater prominence.

The intervention in this house fulfils the mission of dispensing with the fixed and visually heavy elements and redirecting the view to the sloping wooden roof. The continuous light flooring gives the house much lighter, and it highlights, even more, if you will, its peculiar roof.

To achieve this ambitious goal, the living room has been modified, replacing part of the wooden panels with white cladding, as well as the brown tiled floor with continuous light-coloured micro cement. In this way, it is impossible not to focus on the sloping wooden roof.

Following with the change of materiality and distribution of the kitchen, where light tones and lighter materials have been used, it was connected physically and visually with the living room.

On the other hand, all the glass in the house has been renewed, both in the windows and in the upper parts of the partitions. In the day area, the two curved wooden volumes, which hide the kitchen and the study area, do not touch the roof. For this purpose, transparent glass was installed to replace the existing brown ones to separate the areas acoustically and allow the outside light to enter. With this strategic change, the visual perception is that the roof is floating above the house and not lying on these transparent elements.

The distribution of the master bedroom also transforms, creating two dressing rooms and two bathrooms, one on each side of the bedroom, thus generating a more diaphanous space.

It is worth highlighting that all the furniture in the house has been selected in light and neutral tones to achieve, in the entire space, the long-awaited contribution of light and warmth.

We worked with neutral materials to tone down the shrill orange hue that already existed between the coloured glass and the different types of wood. The main milestone was to change the flooring - it was uninteresting because of that orange tone - and both the wood of the roof and the interior woodwork, which were the elements of greatest architectural value, have been conserved and restored. The paving is now clear, and the glass has been changed from orange to transparent.
In terms of materials: the bench and the dressing room are made of neolith, as is the worktop in the main bathroom. The floor is continuous micro-cement paving, and the natural wood panelling has been preserved and restored. The idea is to give the house a facelift, but without forgetting the original elements that are so unique.
The exterior was also intervened by changing the lighting and the swimming pool.

Design and rehabilitation project by Viraje Arquitectura under the leadership of Marta Piqueras, Head of Architecture.

The notary's home by MARTA PIQUERAS ZARAGOZA in Spain won the WA Award Cycle 43. Please find below the WA Award poster for this project.