Residential · Built

Brea Residence

A timeless dialogue between bold geometry, natural materials, and desert light.

The house

Roofs that do the arguing

The house keeps its walls quiet and spends its geometry on the roof. Long planes tilt up and away from the house, so the eaves stay deep where the sun needs blocking and the glass opens where the view is.

Underneath them the palette is short and local: pale limestone laid in long courses, timber cladding and soffits, and dark steel for anything that has to be thin. The stone carries the mass, the wood marks where you enter, the steel disappears.

The plan works off a single line of water. The pool runs the length of the garden face, the covered terrace runs beside it, and every principal room is placed to find both. Upstairs the volume steps back so the terrace below stays in shade through the afternoon.

From the street the house says almost nothing — a timber gate, a run of stone, planting at the kerb. Everything it has to say, it says to the garden.

Photographs

The house as it stands

Covered terrace beside the pool, with a tilted roof plane carried on a slender column — The terrace is a room with one wall missing, and the pool is its floor.

Corner of the two-storey volume in limestone and timber under a winged roof — Where the roof planes cross, the corner opens instead of closing.

Garden face seen across the lawn, with the timber-clad wall and the pool edge — From the lawn: stone below, timber where you touch it.

Entry at dusk: timber door under a deep canopy, with planting along the wall — The entry is a gap in the stone, marked with wood and nothing else.

Street elevation at dusk, lit from within — At dusk the house reads as its roofline. That is the whole composition.

Selected Work in Mexico. Projects led by our principals over three decades of practice in Mexico, many in collaboration with ARTC Arquitectos, our studio in Mexico.

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