The proposed program is simple: to build a family cellar, a space for enjoyment where friends can gather to dine and taste fine wines. To achieve this, the program aims to support the main house while also creating two generous spaces for celebration. These spaces are complemented by a series of auxiliary uses that help define the urban edge. The bathroom, kitchen, storage room, and entrance threshold consolidate the urban front. On the other hand, various grilling areas, an outdoor porch, and a resting space configure the side facing the backyard.

At the same time, the project delves into the memory of this typology of constructions in the Oja Valley, particularly in Bañares, recognizing some fundamental values for the configuration and construction of the project, which are outlined below:

The constructive typology of warehouses, drying rooms, or family cellars is always executed in brick or adobe, achieving an optimal relationship between their compact form and the material used.

Use of a regional construction technique, the “aparejo americano.” This solves the composition of a cavity wall of 35 cm, placing two rows of crossed headers (one resting on the other) and four continuous stretchers, forming a complex bond.
Compact floor plan with few openings to the exterior and shaded spaces at the center.
Presence of a central fireplace for heating and meeting thermal demands.

Wooden roof structures supported by continuous load-bearing walls. A scissor truss configuration is used, recovering the specific knowledge of the valley. Structures are based on the physical limits of locally available wood, approximately 5 meters in length.
Once these aspects are understood, the project proposes a purely material approach. Everything built is structure. From the foundation to the top of the wall, clay is used as the construction material. The brick and its rules dictate the space. The space is interwoven, creating an architecture of boundaries and thresholds. An architecture perceived in fragments, in discontinuity. This approach allows the use of a common brick (acoustic brick db10 from Cerámica Sampedro in Lardero) and elevates its dignity as a construction material. Ultimately, the projected architecture seeks to explore how one inhabits the interior of clay matter.

Additionally, all available resources are utilized. For the roof configuration, laminated pine wood from Soria is used, with a section of 10×20 centimeters and an intermediate scissor truss of the same dimensions. This roof structure creates a sort of latticed space, allowing discontinuous light entry from the west. Finally, the flooring uses two materials produced in the region. Handmade bricks from the Alberite brickyards are used to configure thresholds where the wall structure has been removed, highlighting their load-bearing capacity. Terrazo, produced in Alfaro, provides a cool flooring solution for the long Riojan summers.

The cellar in Bañares is a relational architecture that, by connecting with the roots of the village and the valley in which it is situated, utilizes all available knowledge to create a place deeply rooted in local memory. In short, an architecture that weaves together memory, perception, and experience.

Text provided by the architects.

The granite outcrop on which the house sits is defined by a gentle topography and the imposing presence of a centuries-old oak tree, surrounded by holm oaks and kermes oaks growing among large granite boulders. Among these rocky and vegetative elements—and taking cues from Coderch’s Ugalde House—the building finds its place with an X-shaped floor plan that accommodates the program within the rugged landscape while framing views of its features from the interior.

Built entirely of concrete made on-site using local aggregates, the project proposes permanence and long-term use as alternatives to a form of sustainability often reduced to immediate visual cues. The 50 cm-thick walls are handcrafted in 60 cm-high layers, incorporating insulation between the inner and outer faces. The result is a wall of large, insulated ashlars that remain exposed both inside and outside the house. Against an average lifespan of 50 years, this house is built to last for generations—a home deeply rooted in the landscape like the granite boulders and trees that surround it.

Text provided by the architects.

The racks are a ‘dug-out’ construction within the store, coated with sprayed mortar, with an irregular, highly rough finish: they are the rocks; the floor is a continuous blue, long-pile carpet, that draws waves and different shades of blue under the footsteps of customers: it is the water; and above, in the double-height space, some panels with a volumetric finish reflect the blue color of the carpet (the water in motion) and the colors of the clothes: it is the sky.

The whole is like putting a small cove from Cadaqués into this space. And the central piece of furniture is something like a fisherman’s boat anchored in the middle. Even the fitting rooms, finished in a stuccoed turquoise paint, with a carpet of the same color, can be seen as caves in the sea, where new colors and textures appear.

These three elements, racks, carpet, and ceiling, actually solve a small but very uneven space, with numerous pillars, lowered beams, or irregularities, thus creating a space with a very marked and regular geometry, arranged along a symmetry axis with the entrance.
Finally, the solution of the double-height metallic ceiling, with frames drawing a grid on all its faces, is a direct reference and homage to the American Bar by Adolf Loos, a masterpiece of interior design.

Text provided by the architect.

The resulting house is covered with Arabic tiles, as required by the regulations, and its outer walls are made of reinforced concrete that captures the original façade in time. The solid walls protect the interior, configured by load-bearing masonry, and a sloping concrete slab encloses the space. The exterior openings are made of aluminium frames.

With a massiveness and unchanging forms, Casa 0 reformulates, at a time of paradigm change, the longing that built the neighbourhood, supported by a contemporary conception that makes permanence, in its multiple senses, a central axis of the proposal.

Text provided by the architect.