Coco House by CVA Arquitectos: 230 m² on a steep slope

By Priya Raman

CVA Arquitectos’ Coco House has an area of 230 m² and a 2022 project date. Cristina Vélez Ortiz led the design. Carlos Velez provided the project photographs.

CVA Arquitectos frames the scheme with a direct ambition: “Living immersed in nature.” The firm adds: “House and nature are conceived as an indissoluble entity.”

CVA Arquitectos designed Coco House as a weekend refuge (a short-stay retreat) for Ortiz and her dog, Coco. The project combines personal use with Ortiz’s stated quest to live within nature. The brief names the architect and the dog as its users.

According to CVA Arquitectos, the design process began with the site’s existing vegetation and natural terrain. The architects sought to integrate the building’s volume with both conditions. They also aimed to connect the house precisely to the land.

The steep slope acts as the project’s main constraint and reference. CVA Arquitectos says the house adapts to the ground, merges with it, and becomes an integral part of the surrounding landscape. Site integration (fitting architecture to terrain and vegetation) organizes the scheme.

CVA Arquitectos describes that approach through massing (the overall three-dimensional volume of a building). The supplied summary gives no materials, room sizes, structural details, location, or strategy for measuring environmental performance. It locates the proposal instead in the relationship between volume, plants, and slope.

That relationship is also the project’s clearest architectural proposition. In the architects’ account, the house does not read as an independent volume. Its position follows the slope’s existing shape, while the vegetation remains central to the intended experience of living immersed in nature.

Ortiz’s dual role gives the proposal added specificity. She is the lead architect and the architect for whom the weekend refuge was conceived. CVA Arquitectos presents her search for immersion in nature as the project’s origin, rather than a theme applied after the site was chosen.

Coco is part of the stated brief. The dog shares the refuge with Ortiz, establishing a clear use for repeated weekend stays. CVA Arquitectos does not specify the interior arrangement or the outdoor space, so the occupancy claim comes without an explanation of how each room serves it.

Carlos Velez provided the project photographs. The source’s measurable outline includes 230 m², a 2022 date, a named lead architect, a steep site, and two named users. Together, those facts describe a deliberate move toward terrain-led inhabitation, with the natural ground treated as part of the architecture itself.

What does the steep-slope strategy change for a weekend home?

For Coco House, it makes the 230 m² volume inseparable from the existing terrain and vegetation. The area establishes scale, but CVA Arquitectos gives no room-by-room breakdown, so the summary cannot show how internal space meets the slope. The practical change is spatial: the site shapes the volume, and the volume adapts to the slope.

The limited record also sets clear boundaries for evaluation. The supplied information cannot establish construction cost, durability, accessibility, or energy performance. CVA Arquitectos instead offers a design claim that can be checked through use: whether the house supports its architect and dog without separating them from the slope and vegetation.

As Ortiz and Coco use the 2022 retreat, their experience will provide the practical test of CVA Arquitectos’s central proposition. If the house works for repeated weekends within the steep landscape, the project’s defining idea and its physical siting will operate as one.