If More Than Half a House Is Outdoors Is It Even Still a House?

Or is it heaven?

August 22, 2016 9:00 am

You know the feeling when your city has been swamped with a punishing heat spell for so long that you step outside one morning fully braced to begin sweating profusely and immediately, but then you get out there and it’s actually kind of nice with a cool breeze playing at your doorstep, and you think “Damn I kinda wanna play hooky today.”

This house in Puntarenas, Costa Rica, is the physical embodiment of that feeling.

Sitting at the junction of a jungle and a beach, this house could not be more ideally suited for shunning the daily grind and tapping into the life of quiet leisure we’re convinced never gets old.

The architect, Benjamin Garcia Saxe, studied local wind patterns to create a design that is optimally breezy, with no need for air conditioning. Integrated solar tech, LEDs and rainwater catchments keep the rest of the house high-efficiency as well.

The site is so remote that many of the features and amenities were hand-built on site, including the sinks, doors and cabinetry, so the house’s work-of-art status was earned on merit and craftsmanship as well as its perfect-10 looks.

Many of the walls are made of small folding panels that can open or close depending on your fancy/the weather, meaning that at any given time the many-terraced house is more open-air than not.

All of this begs the questions: If more than 50% of a house is outdoors at any given moment, is it even still a house?

Or is it heaven?

Images via Andres Garcia Lachner

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