Y.J.C

Lima, Peru
Artadi Arquitectos

On the arid coast of Peru, Javier Artadi gives the Modernist white box a crisp new edge in Las Arenas Beach House

Rain almost never falls on the Peruvian coast just south of Lima, the northernmost stretch of one of the driest spots on earth: the Atacama Desert. In this arid landscape, barren mountains and sandy cliffs hover above the Pacific. Beneath a vast, glaring sky, the startlingly empty, alien terrain—with not so much as a cactus on the ground—makes anything built here look like a brusque intrusion. Still, gated communities crowd this inhospitable coast, as Limeños buy up dusty plots to build weekend escapes at the beach. In one such development, Las Arenas, 60 miles south of the capital, architect Javier Artadi has created a house of pure, Minimal, almost simplistic forms—carved-out, white concrete boxes—that belie a complex attitude toward the setting.

By cantilevering the white boxes over a dark gray terrazzo plinth, Artadi detaches the single-story house from the ground plane, letting the forms float visually. At the same time, he brings the beach inside metaphorically, with sand-colored concrete floors. “The idea was to reinvent the beach architectonically,” suggests Artadi, an amateur surfer. Opening the house to outdoor living, he “folded” planes of concrete to demarcate roofs, walls, and floors, subtly jogging the whitewashed surfaces to define shady outdoor rooms, expose a partially cantilevered pool to the sun, and strategically frame views of the broad Pacific panorama. The house becomes an open-ended container that captures sky and horizon within a single volume.

Artadi, a professor at the Peruvian University of Applied Sciences and a principal of the seven-person firm of Artadi Arquitectos, both in Lima, designed the 2,300-square-foot house for a city-dwelling couple and their three children. The property—a flat, 2,400-square-foot, artificially grassy parcel—came with design restrictions, stipulating that the facades could not be concrete, only of wood or other “soft” materials. That didn’t stop the architect from breaking the rules. “Luckily, I knew the board members,” jokes Artadi. In reality, Las Arenas’s governing body—akin to a co-op board—granted a variance to his design, which, the architect suggests, “sets a precedent for other possibilities for the community.”