Casa Morla sits on a sloping terrain overlooking the Pacific Ocean in the increasingly popular coastal village Matanzas (Chile) known as a Mecca for water and wind sports. It sets to resolve the brief of a single family house designated to long term rental.

The brief called for a compact and rather optimized small scale unit so compacting and overlaying the uses as well as avoiding “losing” any space to circulation became the driving forces behind the layout of the program. It’s through this compaction that the kitchen cabinets come to act as the stair ledge and the lower level is granted with an interstice that doubles as a playroom.

As for the formal and volumetric composition, these are both a direct product of the interpretation of the site’s limitations as to the allowed building surface, the views to the ocean and the harsh climate conditions. It’s through the interplay of these factors that the house’s irregular floor plan, its antithetical facades and the footbridge came to be.

In order to gain the best views from the house’s main areas, we opted to locate those on what’s formally the second floor and it only felt logical that one could enter the house at the same level. By leveraging the natural slope of the terrain to the house’s formal advantage, the prominent footbridge came to serve as a promenade and the house’s main access.

The harsh local climate with its strong southern wind, the intense and bothersome afternoon glare and much wanted soft morning sun, shaped the 4 faces of the house that either open up completely through floor to ceiling window glazing or shield away with natural pinewood siding.

Materially and structurally the house is optimized to be easily built by the local workforce. It employs timber and wood for structure and both interior and exterior cladding as these are the only materials the local construction workers handle with confidence. For the same reason the detailing is rather basic and the aesthetics raw and unpolished.

This rather reduced material palette aims to homogenize the visual expression allowing allows the outside views and nature to take the center stage wile architecture withdraws to the backdrop.

Casa Morla’s design and implementation have been quite peculiar to say the least. The project was commissioned to us in 2021 for the locality of Matanzas on the Chilean coast, while residing in Andalucía, Spain. At the time Covid travel restrictions still applied, and although the idea was for us to move back to Chile as soon as possible, we ended up not only designing but supervising the project construction 100 per cent remotely.