Casa Lumen

The brief asked for five bedrooms and a view. We began instead with a void: a courtyard set precisely where the plan would normally place its largest room, open to the sky and deliberately left empty.

A room with no roof

Every other space in the house is organised around this absence. Circulation runs along its four edges, so that moving between any two rooms means crossing a threshold of open air. In February this is an inconvenience. In June it is the reason the house exists.

The walls are rammed earth taken from the site itself, which fixes the building to a single hillside and to a single colour. Above 2.4 metres the earth gives way to board-formed concrete, and the change in material is left visible as a horizon line running through every room.

Eleven openings

Openings were sized by what they were meant to frame rather than by how much light they would admit. There are only eleven of them. Each one was set out on site, in the finished structure, before it was cut.