The studio set out to return to the more traditional and local architectures that made Alicante grow in the 1960s, giving visibility to the structural grid and filling its gaps with full brick or lattice panels. By mixing these elements with the current trend of cliché houses, PLAYstudio includes a white that becomes more complex and nuanced in a painted structure that becomes explicit, matt brick panels, satin-finished carpentry and vitrified latticework.
The result is a game of interesting abstractions that converge in a project where the client and his needs become the protagonists, without giving up on proposing an architecture that is attentive to its contemporaneity.
More Than White House by PLAYstudio. Photograph by Luis Díaz Díaz.
More Than White House by PLAYstudio. Photograph by Luis Díaz Díaz.
Description of project by PLAYstudio
The origin of the design of this unique home located in Cabo de las Huertas in Alicante (southeast Spain) can be summed up in three small stories.
The first, and most obvious, is the one that refers to the client, who dreams of returning to swimming regularly. That is why the first decision when drawing the floor plan of the house is to place a 25 m-long swimming lane on the plot. This fact, together with the unevenness of the plot, explains the flight of the first floor -with an L shape to optimize access to light and views over the first floor, saving the swimming pool, as well as the sequence of access to the interior.
However, the second story has to do with a growing interest in PLAYstudio in the idea of a non-nostalgic remake of certain local architectures as opposed to the usual importation of clichés and global types, foreign and more mediatic. We claim a kind of new identity of the Mediterranean Costa Blanca through the re-celebration, in this case, of the first architecture of the Modern Movement that was the typological standard in the growth of the city of Alicante towards the coast in the 60s - the same as happened in other coastal municipalities. Resources such as giving visibility to the structural grid and the filling of its openings with complete brick or lattice walls, for example, configure a strong identity in the built environment of the beaches of Alicante, where this dwelling is situated and which, on the other hand, configures the habitual imaginary of the client.
It was this image of the client that also introduced the third story. White has practically become the main aesthetic reference on the Costa Blanca, which has seen how in recent decades imposing and aseptic, cubic, pristine, and super-white single-family dwellings have been progressively installed. The client, in fact, a victim of this other imagination, imposes white as a starting condition. Hence the opportunity to initiate another line of research in the studio: the More Than White Houses, a series of single-family dwellings installed on the coast that seek to escape from the pristine, cubic white as a predetermined solution. This is why, in conjunction with the aforementioned, the white is complexified and nuanced in a painted structure that is made explicit, matte brickwork, satin-finished joinery, or vitrified lattices... but all in white, of course.
In short, many types of white form, not without irony (another habitual resource in PLAY), a kind of white on a white background.
