Casa PM Breaks Itself Into a Brick Village in Ecuador's Challuabamba Valley
Feliu Vega Kennedy Arquitectura's 399 m² Casa PM in Challuabamba, Ecuador, hides its steel structure behind exposed brick walls, ceilings and steep gabled roofs.
- Section
- Architecture
- Author
- By Grace Kim
- Filed
- Length
- 2 min read
Key takeaways
- Casa PM measures 399 m² and was completed in 2023 on an 8,600-square-foot lot in Challuabamba, Ecuador.
- Lead architects are Feliu Vega Kennedy and Carlos Espinoza of Feliu Vega Kennedy Arquitectura.
- The single-story, L-shaped house hides its steel structure behind exposed brick, which also forms the ceilings and steep gabled roofs evoking small village cottages.
Casa PM conceals its entire steel structure behind exposed brick, so the load-bearing walls appear to carry the house on their own. Feliu Vega Kennedy Arquitectura, with lead architects Feliu Vega Kennedy and Carlos Espinoza, completed the 399-square-meter house in 2023 on an 8,600-square-foot lot in the warm valley of Challuabamba, Ecuador. The site looks north across wide mountain views, with a small ravine running along its eastern edge.
The clients' brief, as framed by the architects, demanded visual openness. The design preserves the sense of openness in the garden by stacking nothing: Casa PM is a single-story home. Its plan takes an L-shaped configuration — a shorter wing at the front, a longer wing that embraces the garden and captures the surrounding landscape.
The house does not read as one object. According to the architects, it is "broken down into parts, resembling a small village." Its main volumes share gabled roofs and are tied together by a gallery facing the garden. Consistent materials hold the composition together, and those materials are primarily exposed brick — even the ceilings.
The roofs carry the village metaphor further. The sloped roofs were designed with a steep pitch, the architects say, "to evoke the image of small village cottages scattered across the landscape." The gutters are discreetly hidden, keeping the roofline clean.
The structural strategy is the project's quiet trick. The steel structure sits completely concealed behind the brickwork, hiding how the building is supported and giving it "a sense of solidity," in the architects' words. With the frame invisible, the brick walls take center stage — inside and out, from walls to ceiling vaults.
Photography is by JAG Studio. Published documentation includes an upper floor plan, a roof plan, a longitudinal section, and two axonometric drawings — one nocturnal — that lay out the village-like cluster of volumes around the garden.
Casa PM shows how a suburban program can gain presence by subtraction: one story, one material, one hidden frame, and a plan that turns the lot into a small settlement of brick cottages rather than a single block.
Original: images.adsttc.com
