This House in Buenos Aires Now Encloses a Small Jungle After Some Clever Carving
Built at the turn of the 20th century, Casa Leiva by local firm Giusto Van Campenhout features a central courtyard with a classical oculus rendered in workaday concrete.
Built at the turn of the 20th century, Casa Leiva by local firm Giusto Van Campenhout features a central courtyard with a classical oculus rendered in workaday concrete.
Patricio "Pato" Martinez discovered his new house next to a dilapidated industrial building on a leafy street in Chacarita, the neighborhood du jour for young Buenos Aires creatives. The slightly shabby "casa chorizo" (a historical style characterized by outdoor hallways) still had its original early-20th-century details.
And shopworn as it looked, the single-story structure was solid—plus, at 1,800 square feet, the lot was unusually large. Pato took the leap, bought the building, and called on his old friend Santiago Giusto, who runs a Brussels- and Buenos Aires–based architecture firm with his business partner, Nelson Van Campenhout, to renovate it. For Giusto, it was a chance to update a distinctly Argentinean building as his first residential commission in his home country.
Design firm Giusto Van Campenhout transformed the historic home in Buenos Aires and strove to open up the compartments but retain historic details, including the facade. "We worked with two principle rules during the whole process: We could subtract material from the original building, but the only thing we could add was glass," says Giusto.
Photo by Javier Agustín Rojas
The resulting home is overflowing with greenery—and it's the perfect place for its owner, Patricio Martinez, and his girlfriend, Nati Malamute, to unwind.
Photo by Javier Agustín Rojas
"The first stage of the project was to understand what the function of the existing structure would be. How could we work with it and give it new meaning?"
—Santiago Giusta, architect
Tall glass doors give the bedroom a sense of being nested in the plants outside.
Photo by Javier Agustín Rojas
See the full story on Dwell.com: This House in Buenos Aires Now Encloses a Small Jungle After Some Clever Carving
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