Cañete is located 144 kilometers south of Lima, Peru, and its friendly people and kind climate make it attractive to tourists. The nearby Escondida beach presents a wild and arid landscape where you can lose yourself in the horizon which seems to go on forever and you can’t be sure whether the sea is the desert or the desert is a sea of sand.

This is the landscape which provides the setting for Casa Equis, built on a 253 square meter plot, of which the house itself takes up 174 square meters. The house was built by Sandra Barclay and Jean Pierre Crousse, French architects who completed the project in March of 2003, to a design that blends perfectly with the available space and the contours of the landscape.

The underlying concept sprung from the idea of a solid space which would fit perfectly into the landscape and would tame it, creating the right amount of privacy necessary for it to be habitable; the result is a house which is in harmony with the impressive landscape.

The construction makes use of materials which merge seamlessly with the desert landscape, such as the exposed concrete of the walls and ceilings, the polished cement floors and furnishings, the “diablo fuerte” wood (from the Amazon) used for much of the detailing; the tempered glass frameless windows (both fixed and sliding), the cement and paint used to finish the walls; these all combine to ensure that the exterior and interior of the house share the same appearance, imitating the landscape and creating an architectural environment that is perfectly accessible.

This objective was achieved through two main ideas: the first was to build on as much of the site area as possible, which lead on to the emergence of the second idea which was to define the built area in terms of a “solid” volume, rather than simply in terms of the number of cubic yards of construction desired. The result is an exact prism, “stranded” on the sand dunes, which gives the
impression of having always been there. This “original” solid shape is then “excavated” throughout the process of design, removing material in order at the same time both to create and to discover the spaces of the house - somewhat in the manner of archeologists who dig into the sand and discover pre-Colombian ruins that have become buried through the passage of the ages.

This “subtractive” logic, as distinct from the “additive” logic that is typical of most construction is reflected in every aspect of the construction. This process of “excavation” therefore produces spaces that are marked out by an enclosure, where the ambiguity between those spaces that are enclosed and those that are not, is emphasized to the maximum extent. These spaces are also defined by the different relationships that they have between the sky and the sea.

The enclosure is accessed by a threshold that both joins and separates two external spaces: the infinite space of the desert and the intimacy of the entrance hall. This latter space is extended towards the ocean by a large terrace, based on the concept of creating an artificial beach which interacts with the sea and the horizon by means of a long, narrow swimming pool. The deck, conceived as a wide horizontal space covering the width of the plot, frames the seascape and covers the living/dining room, just like a beach umbrella. This design removes the boundaries between the living room and the terrace, which is demarcated by a sliding tempered glass screen.

A comfortable staircase which follows the fall of the plot joins the entrance level with the bedrooms located under the large terrace. The wide landing gives access to the guest bedrooms and the children’s sleeping accommodation, and is sheltered from the sun by the terrace deck.

The use of sand-ochre colors which is common in pre-Colombian and colonial style construction on the Peruvian coast, avoids the“visual ageing” which happens when dust is blown by desert winds and accumulates in these buildings. Employing this color over the whole exterior also defines the extent of the enclosure.

The house projects austerity, rest and silence. It is one with its surroundings and it subtly embraces us, providing us with the opportunity to enjoy a wonderful spectacle: we experience a wild and unique expression of nature, silent and overwhelming, which in another sense has been invaded by the presence of foreign elements which are subject to the continual change of wind, water and sand.