Cercedilla’s territory has been shaped by the three country–city migrations of the last decades. A new kind of inhabitant has emerged, a population that returns to the countryside without actually leaving the city.

Cercedilla is a municipality 60 kilometres from Madrid in the Guadarrama mountains.

When they inherited the house, Ana and Manolo —and their four daughters— decided to build an expansion so as to adapt it to their condition of semi-urban, semi-rural inhabitants.

For the architects, the coexistence of traditional rural communities and new ‘rur-urban’ inhabitants makes it possible to build new ecologies, crucial in order to care for and maintain the balance of a changing territory.

The design consists in a threefold strategy that allows the house to progressively extend, relate, and be thermally insulated, tending to both comfort and energy-consumption, mantaining its rural character.

The home, built in the 70s as a summer house, had no insulation of any kind, nor did it establish any kind of direct relationship with the landscape or surroundings.

During the first phase, a three-volume extension was built within the roof perimeter, with a ceramic cladding distinguishing the new elements: an extended living area, a bedroom for the four daughters, and a boiler room.

 Located where the garage and woodshed were.

Nothing is where it was originally. The furniture is made from the materials recovered from the old front and the roof. The ceiling is now the table, the new doors are a reassembly of the red wooden window shutters…

Moreover, the stone walls are cut and substituted with a pitched metal beam and tie rod, allowing the whole living area to open up towards the landscape.

The Young Old House renders the relationships between objects, inhabitants, and landscapes; between the old, the current, and the new; those that make it possible to rethink contemporary models of inhabiting a ‘rur-urban’ territory.