Comfort born from brick: a flexible house to evolve over time

In Matadepera, at the foot of the Sant Llorenç del Munt massif, a young couple has built their first home on a 600-square-meter plot that was part of a family property. The flat, south-facing site was surrounded by two other houses and dotted with a few trees. The owners wanted a simple yet adaptable home, capable of offering privacy without sacrificing openness and light, and flexible enough to adjust to life's changes.

The architects Alventosa Morell—a Barcelona-based studio founded and directed by Marc Alventosa and Xavier Morell—responded with a clear idea: a modular house that adapts to the terrain and climate, rather than imposing itself. Thus, as can be seen in the attached plan, the project unfolds in nine identical modules, organized along a staggered east-west axis. This structure has allowed them to preserve the existing trees, orient most of the rooms towards the south, and maintain visual distance from their neighbors. Its fragmented and rhythmic form, with volumes that advance and recede, creates intermediate spaces, open views, and a natural relationship with the garden. It also opens up numerous pathways within the house itself.

The central module rises slightly above the rest, and with this simple gesture, the heart of the house is defined: the living room, bathed in light in winter and traversed by cross-ventilation in summer. Openings at different heights and on different facades connect the interior with the landscape and allow the house to breathe.

The importance of the subject

However, the key to the architectural project lies not so much in the form as in the material. The exposed brick load-bearing walls—bare, without cladding or disguise—are simultaneously structure, skin, and thermal resource. With their mass, they accumulate the sun's heat in winter and maintain coolness in summer. This manipulation of thermal inertia, combined with solar orientation and natural ventilation, guarantees stable comfort throughout the year without relying heavily on mechanical systems. "We understand sustainability as the logical result of a rigorous, efficient process committed to a rational, contextual, and environmentally sensitive architecture," summarize the architects at Alventosa Morell.

The exposed brick can also be seen as an aesthetic statement. Its textures and joints create a subtle grid that engages with the Catalan vaults of the ceilings and the window openings. Ultimately, this is an architecture that draws from local building traditions without succumbing to nostalgia. The Mediterranean language is expressed here in the honesty of the materials, the natural light, and the relationship established between interior and exterior.

The continuity of the interior spaces extends into the garden through plant-covered pergolas that echo the structural grid and, in a way, help create climate-resilient havens. Under these filtered shadows, domestic life extends outwards, and the house breathes with its surroundings. The space, both inside and out, can be experienced as a whole or divided into more intimate areas, depending on the moment or needs: this is a flexible house without hierarchies, designed to evolve with its inhabitants.

With a constructed area of 143 square meters, Casa GJ—the name the architects have given the project—is an exercise in balance: neither large nor small, neither rural nor urban, neither technological nor vernacular. Above all, it is a house that returns to the essential idea of dwelling—with a sense of place, climate, and time. In its apparent simplicity, it conceals a wisdom accumulated in the Catalan tradition of building well, with honest materials, with moderation, and with a climate intelligence that is once again essential. Alventosa Morell have created here a serene, rational, and deeply rooted architecture that finds in bare brick not only a material, but a way of life that is warm, durable, and in constant dialogue with light and the earth.