Project: Buried House
Architects: Kallos Turin
Architecture and Design: Stephania Kallos, Abigail Turin, Jose Luis Ravenna
Local Architect Of Record: Andres Villaba, Diego Amaroso
Lighitng Consultant: George Sexton Associates
Landscape Designer: Amalia Robrero
Contractor: Orlando Spagni
Location: Punta del Este, Uruguay
Area: 345 m²
Year: 2019
Photographs: Juan Hitters
Buried House is one of the several seasonal vacation homes Kallos Turin designed on the Villalagos Estate on the coast of Uruguay near Punta del Este. The firm approached the design of Buried House with the idea that the home should be simple in its massing and detailing, consistent in its use of materials, and carefully placed on the land to preserve the site’s integrity and avoid the impression of a conventional house dropped into an otherwise pristine hillside.
Buried House is carved into the landscape to create an equilibrium between indoor and outdoor living. A monolithic use of materials, flat roofs, precise detailing and alignments, large panes of frameless glass, and doors that pocket seamlessly into the walls all help to achieve an abstraction of form.
The firm worked closely with the landscape designer to stitch the roof of the villa seamlessly into the land where it feels like an extension of the landscape and is a punctuation of the natural grasses that surround it. Local South American materials and building technologies are used throughout the property– walls of stucco and glass, poured concrete floors, and local hardwood forms the basis of the material palette.
Kallos Turin dotted the villa’s landscape with concrete stepping stones to connect the home with a large outdoor patio with a fire pit, an important element of Uruguayan culture, that is situated at the edge of one of the property’s lakes. This patio is surrounded by a native prairie landscape, that the firm developed in collaboration with the landscape designer, and its modern and austere design contrasts with the native greenery that surrounds it.
