In English, “La Casa de los Cinco Picos” translates as “the House of the Five Peaks,” a reference to the prominently pitched, shed-like gables that largely define the appearance of this family getaway in the rocky foothills of the Guadarrama Mountains north of Madrid, Spain. According to the architects, Clara Ulargui Aparicio and Luis Aguilar Benavides of Positivelivings, the points themselves also reference several key elements that informed their design. The most obvious is the home’s jagged, mountainous setting. Another, perhaps subtler, homage is to the traditional forms of Spanish industrial architecture: straightforward buildings with sawtooth rooflines providing light and ventilation to the workspace within. Both seem wholly appropriate, because the house was essentially built in a factory and delivered to the mountainous site.
A publisher of magazines about construction and new building technologies, the homeowner was enthusiastic to go the prefab route, and have a house that was created off-site and then essentially installed on his lot, rather than constructed from the ground up in the traditional method. After considering and then rejecting various types of completely prefabricated houses, he hired Madrid-based architectural firm Positivelivings in 2019 to envision his vacation home. With a profound slope covered by massive swaths of solid granite, it was not an ideal building site.
The lot’s location at the junction of two streets increased the difficulty of siting the house so that it would not be overlooked by every passing car. “The biggest issue was simply where to put the house,” says Ulargui Aparicio, noting that she and her partner spent days walking over the plot considering the views, sightlines and how to create a private enclave. “But we adapted our ideas to the reality of the lot, leaving the natural landscape intact.”
They didn’t cut down trees or bushes or try to soften the rocky ground. Indeed, they even built the house around a thicket of trees. Once they knew where the house would sit (atop the granite, on the most level plateau on the lot), they resolved to build the shell of the house — all exterior and load-bearing walls and roof — with made-to-measure prefabricated panels of CLT (cross-laminated timber) attached to two platforms of prefabricated hollow core concrete slabs. The platforms are constructed on low concrete walls, which do the work of correcting the lot’s slope and unevenness, thereby providing level floor surfaces inside. The house doesn’t touch the ground, but floats slightly above it.
Dedicated to passive house design, Aguilar Benavides and Ulargui Aparicio created the layout to maximize southern exposure, adding large upper windows in the “picos” to allow warming rays of sunshine inside in winter, when the sun is low, but with a small overhang that keeps direct sunlight out during Madrid’s sometimes blazing-hot summers. All the openings were carefully placed and scaled, as if the architects were curating landscape vistas while also screening out bits of the road or neighbouring houses to enhance the sense of being completely immersed in nature.
“Window deployment was essential to making the home seem larger than its 160 square metres — they bring the outdoors in and expand the space visually,” says Aguilar Benavides. Diagonal views through other parts of the house further enhance the spacious feeling. Of course, all these sightlines had to be imagined and then calculated before any work on the CLT panels began. Once the clients and architects agreed to a design, the CLT manufacturer, AlterMateria, created a 3D model of the house for approval. “It’s a highly efficient process,” Aguilar Benavides notes, “but once that 3D model gets the okay from the client, the factory gets to work and there can be no additions or changes.”
In the best circumstances, CLT walls for a house this size could be built in about a month, but as this project coincided with COVID, there was no shortage of shortages, and it took considerably longer. Finally, the panels arrived on a truck and a crane hoisted them into location. With industrial precision (measurements are in millimetres), there were no construction surprises, and it took less than a week to complete the house’s shell. Then came a system of external insulation and surfacing, as well as the interior buildout with more traditional construction techniques.
According to Ulargui Aparicio, the house is a series of volumes of different scales, which have morphologies that hint at their purpose. Inside the larger “public wing,” the sunken living room compensates for the uneven terrain while also creating a spacious haven where family members can each do their own thing yet still hang out together. And the golden CLT panels give the interiors a warm, inviting natural glow. Beside the larger primary bedroom, the other two bedrooms form a more flexible space (a sort of “camp wing,” say the architects) that the family can arrange as needed. While the idea of industrialization and factory-made materials might seem at odds with preserving natural landscapes, here, the combination has scored a point — five points, in fact — for doing just that.
A Factory-Made Modern House in Spain
Built to the stringent specifications of its rocky context, a home designed by Spanish firm Positivelivings merges the possibilities of prefab and cross-laminated timber.