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Architects: Enrique Espinosa, Lys Villalba
- Year: 2019
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Manufacturers: Ceràmica Cumella, Cortizo, Ikea
Text description provided by the architects. The territory of Cercedilla, a municipality located 57 kilometers from Madrid in the Sierra de Guadarrama, has been shaped by the three countryside-to-city migrations of the last decades. During the past decade, a new type of rural inhabitant has emerged, who is at the same time urban: a population that returns to the countryside without having left the city.
These transient citizens generate new ruralities and alliances that continue to transform the landscape: in Ana and Manolo's meadow, The Young Old House, Luis, a local cattle farmer, grazes his cows, which in turn take care of this area of the mountain in exchange for fresh herbs. The coexistence between traditional rural communities and new rural-urban inhabitants allows for the construction of new ecologies, essential for maintaining the balance and care of a changing territory.
After inheriting this country house, Ana, Manolo, and their four daughters set out to make it grow and adapt it to their semi-urban and semi-rural conditions. The house, built in the 1970s as a summer home, had no thermal insulation, nor a direct relationship with the landscape and surroundings. Therefore, a triple strategy is designed to progressively expand, relate, and thermally condition the house, taking care of both comfort and energy consumption, as well as the enjoyment of its rural condition.
In the first phase, already executed, an expansion is carried out through three volumes under the roof, covered with ceramic pieces that differentiate the new: an extended living area, the room for the four daughters (in the space previously occupied by the garage and firewood storage), and a room for heating installations. The stone walls are cut and in their place, a metal structure of beams and tensioners is designed, allowing the new living area to fully open towards the landscape. The roof is replaced and, in the process, its materials are recovered, which will be transformed into furniture for the house.
Starting next summer, Sahari, a former mason and now an employee of the family, will disassemble the stone and wood from each of the house's facades year after year, incorporating the necessary thermal insulation on the existing wall, and rebuilding them with the previously recovered materials, this time with a new pattern. The house will grow in layers, gradually adapting in successive phases.
In The Young Old House, nothing is in its original place. The furniture in the house is made from materials recovered from the old facade and roof. Now the ceiling is on the table - four old beams form the dining tables - the facade is a long bench - made of recovered railway sleepers - the reassembled red shutters are the new doors, the slate from the old roof waits in the barn to become the future facade, the granite from the firewood storage is the new step to the countryside...
To this family of old materials with second lives, another new one is added, mainly made of metal, which brings the house closer to the landscape: a hidden door to go directly to the countryside, rotating lamps to dine in the meadow on summer nights, four foldable beds, two portholes to see through, from the north, the southern landscape.
The Young Old House makes visible an alliance between objects and inhabitants of the rural and urban environment, between the old, the updated, and the new, which allows us to rethink contemporary models of inhabiting a rural-urban territory.
