La ladera de la Fuensanta
[refurbishment of family house]
Horche, ES | 2004-2006

When I was still in school, my parents bought an old caretaker’s house on Horche, a little village in Castilla-La Mancha. A stone structure with walls 80 centimeters thick, it was in ruins - cracked, damp, with rotting stairs and crumbling plaster. We had to redo it almost entirely: seal the cracks, reinforce the walls, replace the roof, redo the installations, build a new staircase, re-plaster the exterior, and rebuild the interior from scratch.

For two years, every weekend, my parents and I - joined sometimes by friends and family - poured our energy into restoring it. That house became my first, most intense lesson in architecture, long before I ever studied it formally. It taught me to love working with my hands, to believe in the slow, deliberate act of making.

Eternal thanks to my parents, whose tireless work and deep respect for craft showed me how to do a little bit of everything - and to do it with love