Old barn turned into a home
by Architecture Office MAAV

A tiny farm cottage located in Ojacastro, La Rioja, Spain, was meant to become an occasional apartment through a complete rehabilitation, designed and conducted by MAAV.

MAAV is an architecture office based between Bilbao, Sevilla and Madrid, and founded by Adrián Martínez and Guillermo Avanzini. They develop public buildings and private commissions.

For the architects, urban planning instruments can often endanger rural morphologies. Such is the case of this plot, intended to locate a three-storey building.

Leading to the destruction of sometimes secular constructions by increasing building rights.

That has nothing to do with the scale of the urban fabric of the town of Ojacastro.

The owners’ sensitive criteria managed to stop the degradation of this corner of the town avoiding the loss of heritage that would have meant the execution of the urban planning.

Together with the willingness of the City Council to allow the intervention.

The inside is conceived as an habitable piece of furniture: a light balloon - frame house is built, filling the space between the massive stone walls.

Reduced surface requires the entire house program to be developed in a single space. Foldable furniture, a wall bed, a kitchen hiding wardrobe, storage, home appliances, and so on.

All of them hidden in the thick walls, but ready to be used whenever needed.

The living room is easily transformed into the dining room and then again into the bedroom.

Regarding the construction, the stone walls are kept and strengthened, so are roof tiles.

Seriously harmed wooden framework of the roof is replaced by a similar fishbone-shaped ceiling made out of laminated timber beams.

This small intervention crystallizes an attitude that seeks to identify rural morphologies and join them at the rate of development of this environment.

Author MAAV: Adrián Martínez and Guillermo Avanzini
Location Ojacastro, La Rioja, Spain
Year 2020
Collaborators Enrique Uyarra (Constructor), Victor M. Sánchez (Carpentry)
Promoter Rocío Avanzini y Germán Barbier.
Cost 83.000 €
Surface 40sqm
Photography Guillermo Avanzini Alcibar

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