How They Pulled It Off: A Rural Vacation Home in Colombia Works With the Sloping Terrain

Welcome to How They Pulled It Off, where we take a close look at one particularly challenging aspect of a home design and get the nitty-gritty details about how it became a reality.

Barichara has been called Colombia’s most beautiful town, with its rural, serene setting, stone streets, and unique building traditions that make it feel "suspended in time, resisting the invasion of modernity," as Gabriel García Márquez described in Love in the Time of Cholera. The town has changed little since the 18th century, with a construction industry relying on traditional methods. Artisans handcraft bricks and tiles, placing them one by one into a furnace, the same way their ancestors once did.

This commitment to Colombo-Colonial architecture, a style characterized by rammed earth walls, stone masonry, and tile roofs, in rural Barichara and the surrounding areas "has an inherent beauty, yet is often restrictive as a method of contemporary spatial experimentation in extreme topographies," says architect Alejandro Saldarriaga, founding principal of Alsar-Atelier.

Saldarriaga, who formed his practice during the pandemic, recently designed a country home in the remote town. "The closest airport is a three-hour drive," he says. And while it’s a trek for tourists, its recognition as a heritage site has attracted people both to visit and build homes.

For this project, a 2,600-square-foot home that reinterprets the Colombo-Colonial vernacular, he was challenged to work with a sloping site with extreme topography. The design separates private and public zones while offering a sense of movement and open vantage points. The proposal doesn't "fight against the terrain but is placed on different levels, distributed from the highest topography to the more public zones," he says. Furthermore, it was done on a budget and came in at under $100,000.