For Nereidas Homes, Studio Font orients individual spaces toward carefully framed views, while communal areas extend lengthwise into the landscape, defined by two intersecting roof planes, a double-height fire pit, and a cascading cylindrical pool.
The pigmented concrete structure, open to the desert, creates deep shadows and varying levels that guide movement while maintaining visual continuity with the landscape. The design thus approaches the logic of a contemporary ruin: a permanent structure that sustains life while allowing the landscape, climate, and time to act upon it.
Nereidas Homes by Studio Font. Photograph by Albers Studio.
Project description by Studio Font
Nereidas Homes is an architectural project located in the desert landscape of Baja California. Situated near Todos Santos, the project occupies a eight thousend-square-meter plot characterized by sculptural cacti and uninterrupted views toward the Sierra de la Laguna Mountains and the Pacific Ocean.
The project is conceived as a house broken into architectural pieces, a fragmentation that allows each inhabited unit to secure privacy while establishing a specific and deliberate visual relationship with the surrounding landscape. This strategy distributes domestic life across the site, avoiding a single enclosing volume.
The house is articulated through a set of private rooms and a shared structure, arranged to balance containment and openness across the site. Individual spaces are oriented toward precisely framed views, while the collective areas extend longitudinally, engaging the full breadth of the landscape and accommodating shared use.
There are three private units across the landscape, conceived as a single continuous interior in which sleeping, resting, and bathing coexist without subdivision. Curved interior walls open onto three distinct windows, each framing a different portion of the landscape and generating specific atmospheres within the same room. Beds, seating, storage, and bathrooms are integrated into the architectural envelope, allowing each activity to relate to its own visual field while remaining part of a unified spatial volume. Access to the roof extends inhabitation vertically, reinforcing a direct connection between private space, sky, and horizon.
The shared structure forms the primary collective space of the project. Its configuration is defined by two crossing roofs that unfold a double-height fire pit and a cascading cylindrical pool, and creating distinct settings for gathering, dining, and rest.
Fully open along its length, the structure establishes continuous visual and spatial alignment with the desert. Overlapping planes generate deep shade, while changes in height guide movement through space without the use of conventional partitions.
The architecture is built entirely in pigmented concrete, used simultaneously as structure and finish. The pink tone gives warmth to the material, allowing the building to register variations in light throughout the day and intensifying the contrast with the surrounding vegetation, particularly after rainfall, when the landscape becomes visibly greener.
Environmental systems are integrated into the project’s design. The house operates fully off-grid: electricity is generated through photovoltaic solar panels, and a thermosolar system provides hot water. Water reuse strategies reduce demand on local resources, and all vegetation displaced during construction was replanted on site, maintaining continuity of the existing desert ecosystem.
Nereidas Homes proposes a mode of inhabiting the desert that approaches architecture as a constructed condition intended to remain. In this sense, the house operates closer to the logic of a contemporary ruin: a permanent framework that supports habitation while allowing landscape, climate, and time to act upon it.
