This X-shaped house is the design brain child of great architectural minds. From Cadaval & Sola-Morales of Barcelona, Spain, comes the aptly-named X house. It’s shaped like that to answer all the requirements of the customer, while at the same time, paying close attention to the site conditions and methods that would result in minimum damage to nature. The home has very little presence from street level, making it a hideaway of sorts. But make no mistake, this is an architectural masterpiece. The entrance is on the roof. There are two levels, plus the pool. The centerpiece of the entire house is a 26-ft marble table. The home is built using the same robust construction – and high density concrete – that is used to build major bridges and tunnels. And aside from the high-design concrete construction, the towering floor to ceiling windows and glorious space, the house has the triple play of views. Valley, Mountain and Sea. X marks the spot.
Here’s from the architects, about the challenges they faced designing this magnificent house:
“The X House project aims to solve by the definition of a system, language, or even through a unique form, a number of inquiries that arise when we consider the given site: how to protect and give transcendence to an impressive pine, which is located on the top of the site and makes access to the house extremely complex from the street; how to avoid deciding between the views of the sea and those of the mountains, allowing both to be viewed in opposite directions; how to neutralize through form the presence of the adjacent buildings in order to create a feeling of isolation; how to allow quality views from both the front and the rear of the house; how to address so many requirements with a simple movement that answers all of the previous aims without prioritizing nor explicitly formulating a response to any of them. The form, a unique form, is the result of a long process of search for individual answers to each of those challenges; thus, the form is not a priori, but an effort to give a unitary response which satisfies each of these stipulations.”
