House Meets Garden: Guest Pavilion in Quintay, Chile by Tironi Bartlau.

Photo by Felipe Fontecilla.

Photo by Matthew Neary.

Photo by Felipe Fontecilla.

Located in the seaside town of Quintay on the picturesque coast of Chile, this Guest Pavilion by Santiago-based architecture studio Tironi Bartlau sits within the grounds of an existing holiday home. Designed as a dedicated guesthouse, the detached extension has been inserted at the rear of a very long and narrow plot facing the Pacific Ocean.

“We set out not to simply build a new building in the vacant space,” explain Tironi and Bartlau, “but to renovate the entire site, creating a series of gardens in between the two houses.” This was achieved through a simple intervention of extracting and reinforcing what was already there, like some of the dimensions of the existing house and the scale of the trees.

Related: Portable Cabin in Poznan, Poland by Wiercinski Studio.

Photo by Felipe Fontecilla.

Photo by Felipe Fontecilla.

Photo by Matthew Neary.

Photo by Felipe Fontecilla.

From here the architecture team built a two-story structure with “minimum ground occupation”. Building upwards to the maximum height of construction frees up the maximum available space on the ground floor while ensuring the pavilion could have water views above the existing house.

Throughout the project, both the building itself and its surroundings were equally considered. As the duo explains—“With this architecture, we aimed to emphasise the relationship between house and garden, intimate and extroverted, inside and outside spaces.”

With this in mind, the exposed skeleton-like structure, based on a continuous 100 x 200 mm section of steel beams and columns, was placed outside the enclosure layer, aesthetically reinforcing the idea of incompleteness to form an ambiguity between inside and outside.

Photo by Felipe Fontecilla.

Site floor plan of the guesthouse. Courtesy of Tironi Bartlau.

Photo by Matthew Neary.

This mismatch of senses is reinforced in the cross-section of the house. A succession of two stairs enfilade, one on the inside and the other on the outside, connecting both sides of the building from one garden to the other.

On the ground floor, the rooms have very low ceiling heights and precise openings. They are slightly fitted below the ground level at the rear façade and at the same level as the outside terrace at the front façade. With this approach, the architects have ensured a tactile yet protected relationship with the exterior.

On the top floor, a different story unfolds. Open, with a very tall ceiling and fully glazed walls without corners, guests feel like they’re living amongst the trees. And with the distant horizon of the sea never far from the eye, one can certainly doubt whether they are actually inside.

Related: Rural Guesthouse in Spain by Lucas y Hernández-Gil.

[Images courtesy of TIRONI BARTLAU. Photography by Felipe Fontecilla & Matthew Neary.]