“Ugly can be beautiful. The beautiful, never,” said Paul Gauguin. And this sentence from the famous painter is at the genesis of this artist's house and workshop in Baix Empordà. The Danish painter Erik Peistrup commissioned the project for his house to the Rien studio of Rien Architecture, directed by the Barcelona architect Olga Lloberes and the Parisian interior designer Michel Nativel. He warned them that the plot had a “problem”: a very high and ugly party wall on a side boundary. That “problem” became a challenge that brought uniqueness to the project.
The architects decided to ally themselves with the wall and build from it instead of avoiding it, “to create an enveloping space understood as a refuge, as a chrysalis, a place to live, an emotional space of transformation and expansion of the house towards the atelier, the patio and the garden,” explains Lloberes.
Like Gauguin, the architects of @rienderien.architecture consider that beauty, to manifest itself, must avoid the obvious and, above all, what is merely decorative. In this case, the workshop house is reminiscent of the Mexican architect Luis Barragán, who took advantage of changing natural light to create unique and exciting visual experiences. The sculptural beauty of the construction also refers to the dematerialization of the works of the Basque sculptor and poet Jorge de Oteiza, one of Lloberes' favorite creators.
The house is made up of two volumes, one for the home, and the other occupied by the guest room and the workshop. In some way, it refers to the pre-existing barn on the plot, with the gable roof but cut in half longitudinally and the bodies slightly displaced to break the linearity. Lloberes explains that they projected it understood, not so much as a surface, but as a volume, “always upward, working with emptiness, nakedness, light, air, fragrance. “If light and air enter a space, they flood it with life.”
Of decided brutalist inspiration, the proposal emphasizes the nakedness of the exposed concrete structure and highlights the power of the ribs of the roof ribs, creating forceful geometries. “In architecture there is no emotion without structure; Without nerve there is no poetry,” says the architect.
On the interior walls and facades, the rawness of the concrete is nuanced with lime mortar in raw and earthy tones. The structure has been left visible, but dyed with natural sand-colored pigment. The atmosphere is somewhat powdery, to evoke warmth, comfort, calm, spirituality and silence.
The scenographic use of light beams, with strategically open skylights on the very high ceilings and walls, creates lights and shadows that are always changing and fluctuating throughout the day. Added to the movement of the clouds, they give the impression that the house breathes between the Montgrí mountain, the earth and the sky.
On the ground floor are the living room, a kitchen open to the rear patio, Erik Peistrup's atelier, a guest room with a bathroom, the hall and a guest toilet, as well as the garden, from which you can access the house, and it has a swimming pool.
The steel furniture in the kitchen, the sinks in each bathroom and the main lamps in the living room and bedrooms have been custom designed by the architects. Also the closets and the interior carpentry, with spectacular chestnut doors that reach 3.40 meters high.
"We have used traditional materials, such as lime mortar coatings, kitchen finishes, or wooden lamps, and we have also avoided anything that is motorized or very techy. They are very basic solutions, but there is no need to overdo it. To achieve a contemporary style, you can achieve it from the essentials," reflects Olga Lloberes.
The atelier is a perfect cube of 6.5x6.5x6.5 m3 that does not look like it, with its “breaks” and voids in strategic points, like Oteiza's sculptures. “Each constructed form is a deliberate statement to be able to transmit Erik's own universe and for the artist to feel, when inhabiting it, that his world is in this place,” concludes Lloberes.
