Valtocado House

Arquitectos:
Mathias Klotz
Rafel de Lacour

Colaboradores:
Eduardo Ruiz Risueño
Diego Labbe

36°35’47.65″N
4°40’31.67″O
Mijas
España

Superficie casa: 445 m2
Superficie terreno: 2130 m2

Valtocado house is the first house that I was commissioned in Europe. The clients, a couple of Swiss lawyers, had for years a piece of land in Valtocado, a neighboring residential neighborhood of Mijas on the Costa del Sol.

Ruth and Bernard, residents of Zurich and Monaco, decided to find an architect to develop this house in order to spend a few seasons in it, escaping the cold Swiss winter.

 For this, they went to the city library separately with the task of each one bringing back a list of names with eventual candidates to develop a proposal.

Fortunately for me, a publication from the Japanese magazine GA Houses had arrived that week, which included several of my works and was on display.

By that chance, it happened that in the afternoon, both of them had my name at the top of the list of possible architects.

They contacted me; I traveled to Spain to meet them and get to know the terrain.

The commission was to make something very comfortable, with only two rooms, easy to clean and simple to maintain.

The house is very simple, it is a single volume that looks towards the African coast.

A skylight rises and runs along the rear façade, giving privacy to the roof terrace.

On the front, a railing that incorporates the pool, serves as a viewpoint to the sea and the surrounding agricultural landscape.

The materiality minimal. It seeks to generate a quiet and clean space, as well as warm.

Because it was a work in Spain, I asked Javier García Solera to recommend a correspondent architect in Malaga to give me a hand to carry out this proposal.

That was how I met Rafael de Lacour, who helped me for years in this company. (Today, before writing this text, I just received an email from Rafael, in which he confirms that tomorrow Roland Halbe, the photographer of all these works, will go to take the photos. He also told me that the habitability license is soon to be issued by the municipality).

This is not minor, considering that the first contact to carry out this work was nine years ago, in which many things happened, but fortunately Ruth never lost interest and hope that we could finally build the work.