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The Lovely and Surreal Architecture of Casa Luz

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At first sight, these joyous rich reds and whites, the contrasting textures with the white hand-plastered wall, and the air of spartan cleanliness in the white industrial design are exhilarating.

What a great foyer… are these hip, cool dental offices, perhaps?

The red and white structure, a renovation by  ARQUITECTURA-G , can be glimpsed within an old stone ruin in Cilleros, in Spain’s Extremadura.

We are used to romanticising ruins like this.

But the narrow, windowless site within a hand-plastered wall was beyond disrepair when a young family sought to remake it as their home.

They were not content with merely inserting new shutters into the ancient stone walls, lovely as these are in their contrast.

The Casa Luz (House of Light) is a radical renovation of a ruin into housing for a young family.

The new interior fills the tiny lot and wraps the rooms around an open central courtyard bringing light in from above.

A tree that had grown in the center of the lot was kept on.

The wraparound rooms of the home have an almost surrealistic air of antiseptic modernity.

The greenery from the old tree is the perfect graphic foil, softening the harsh, sterile railings and white-painted industrial walkways.

Along the long back wall, the house only extends the width of a passageway, widening out into the living area/kitchen/dining on the second floor.

Among the surrealistic elements of this youthful abode, strangely, there is almost no lighting in the kitchen – only this one light on the living room wall.

Perhaps it was impossible to add much electricity to this antiquated site?

The few ugly kitchen fixtures suggest that they will be added later as finances allow?

The ground floor entry allows the rainfall from the courtyard to wash out through the entryway.

How different from the original damp, dark and moldy structure crouching on the ground floor.

With the tree as the central focal point in the tiny lot, a sliding door allows privacy for a bath on the second floor.

Opposite the bath, strangely, a toilet appears to have less privacy.

Or perhaps the sliding door slides from side to side of the bathroom, offering privacy?

It is altogether a compellingly mysterious and almost surrealistic architecture, but not without the charm of the strange.