Nine Months Outside

The first thing Clara said to us was: "I do not want a house. I want a garden with a roof."

## The Requirement

Clara and Jorge had moved from Buenos Aires to Barcelona five years earlier. They had lived in Eixample — a beautiful apartment, high ceilings, Modernista tilework, and a balcony so narrow that opening the door constituted the entire outdoor experience. For five years, they watched Barcelona's climate through glass: the nine months of sun, the jasmine-scented evenings, the December days when the temperature still reaches fifteen degrees and you can eat lunch outside in a sweater.

They found the plot in Gava — a residential suburb between the Garraf hills and the Baix Llobregat coast, twenty minutes from Barcelona by car, forty by train, and a world away in lifestyle. Six hundred square metres of flat land, south-facing, sheltered from the Tramontana by a ridge of umbrella pines.

"We want to live outside," Clara said. "From March to November, I want the house to be open. Not open like — I can see the garden. Open like — there is no boundary."

## The Design of Openness

We designed the villa as a series of covered and uncovered spaces arranged around a central courtyard — not a house with a garden, but a garden with inhabitable pavilions. The living room has no north wall; it opens entirely onto the courtyard through a ten-metre sliding glass panel that disappears into a pocket wall. When open, the living room and courtyard become a single space. When closed — during the three winter months when Clara conceded she might want a wall — the glass becomes a window onto the garden, not a barrier against it.

The kitchen extends into an outdoor cooking area beneath a timber pergola draped with bougainvillea. The dining table is a single six-metre slab of iroko that begins indoors and ends outdoors, crossing the threshold as though the concept of inside and outside were someone else's problem.

The children's rooms face east, catching the morning light that Clara insisted upon — "children should wake up before the house does" — and each opens onto a private terrace screened by jasmine and pittosporum.

## What They Changed

Jorge, who is an engineer and had arrived at the first meeting with a spreadsheet of requirements, had specified air conditioning throughout the house. We installed it. In the first summer, they did not turn it on once. The cross-ventilation — designed by mapping the prevailing sea breeze from the southeast and the evening thermal descent from the Garraf — kept the interior below twenty-six degrees through July and August.

"I have spent a fortune on something I do not use," Jorge said, with the particular satisfaction of a man who has discovered that the most expensive technology is the one you do not need.

The Mediterranean house is not a shelter from the climate. It is a frame for the climate — and the best ones dissolve the frame entirely.