TAMPICO HOUSE - A PATIO IN THE ATLANTIC - By Ramón Esteve

This house is located in a reserved condominium in the city of Tampico, on the east coast of Mexico. The plot required creating its own landscape and multiplying its perspectives so that the spaces could flow longitudinally.

To this end, a series of parallel walls were designed, executed with local stone masonry (Galarza), projecting each space in two directions. Each room opens to two orientations, north and south, making the succession of spaces permeable and at the same time allowing a gradient of privacy, from the entrance garden to the rear pool. The central atrium, although exterior, becomes a resource of interior articulation that multiplies the feeling of openness of all the surrounding rooms. A courtyard that blurs the interior and exterior limits.

Upon entering the house a spiral staircase has a sculptural character that gives character to the double-height lobby and welcomes family and visitors. Confined in its square floor plan, it unfolds in a three-dimensional wooden zigzag that stitches both floors together. A backlit panel of Onyx serves as a backdrop to this ascent to the second floor where the bedrooms are located and signifies this central space of the house.

Immediately adjacent to the hall, a courtyard follows to draw in the void the visual connection that exists between the different rooms of the house. An atrium that allows us to understand the house as a succession of full and empty spaces, of gardens, courtyards and rooms, of reflections and transparencies. These transparencies are correctly nuanced by the aluminum cons that sift the visuals between day and night areas and protect from excessive sunlight the large glass panels that, from floor to ceiling, connect each room with its immediate outdoor space.

These outdoor spaces are dressed with local vegetation and blur the boundaries of the plot, adding another layer to the succession of closed and open living spaces, where materials, vegetation and water planes build a geometric melting pot. That contained plot, thanks to the use of the courtyard as a great articulator of spaces, now reveals all its possibilities. The concatenation of full and empty spaces enriches the interior life of this house that paradoxically seeks to blur the perpendicular limits of its walls.

Different sheets of water also accompany the bordering spaces, thus awakening the sense of hearing with the murmur of water and improving the thermal behavior of the house by cooling its cross ventilation. The swimming pool is the last horizon of this house where the water merges with the surrounding vegetation. Next to it, an outdoor gazebo projects the interior domesticity outdoors, inviting social life to bathe the exterior.

The dialogue between materials; stone, wood, concrete and glass, frame a project where interior and exterior return each other’s gaze. While natural light bathes the stone walls and floods every room from floor to ceiling, artificial lighting stages the tectonics of the stone and turns the house into a jewel that shines at night with its own light.