Casa patio casa patio – a Courtyard Home Reborn with Color
Casa patio casa patio is a compact house in Valencia, Venezuela, reworked by Piano Piano Studio. The project keeps its rural backbone—two courtyards and a firm central axis—while resetting circulation and use on the ground level. A new vaulted stair reunites both floors, and two color-rich volumes calibrate storage and service. The work lands with measured restraint and bright pragmatism, tuned for breezes, daylight, and a social life that spills into the patios.
The gate swings and the street drops away. Light slides across fruit trees toward a façade marked by flashes of blue and the promise of a quiet interior.
This is a house refit in Valencia, Venezuela, by Piano Piano Studio, and the core move is plan: preserve the rural axis and sharpen the sequence between patios. The strategy centers on how rooms connect, how circulation breathes, and how daily life tracks from street to garden.
Enter Between Courtyards
Arrival starts just off the street, through a generous door that now works in multiple ways. One leaf opens fully, or a smaller aperture invites a conversation, daylight, and cross-ventilation without letting the dogs slip out. The threshold sets the tone for the interior—porous yet controlled—and pulls breeze across the plan when the rear patio doors are cracked open on warm afternoons.
Axis And Volumes
The original rural typology remains legible, with a marked central axis and two lateral runs. Two new volumes slide into that geometry, aligned to sightlines and diagonals drawn from the existing rooms. One nests the bathroom; the other organizes kitchen storage, and both stop short of the ceiling to keep the plan fluid while marking edges for everyday use.
Stair As Link
A vaulted stair returns where one had been lost. Set in two flights along the façade and party wall, it restores connection to the upper level and rebalances movement across the ground floor. The geometry reads as a quiet sculpture, and the landing points ease transitions so circulation bends, not breaks, at corners.
Porch And Thresholds
At the back, the old porch is reopened to tighten the relationship between cooking and the southwest courtyard. A pass-through window at the kitchen makes serving simple during slow, low winter sun; it frames a view and trims steps in the daily loop. Four end rooms sit open yet tucked, ready for screens or curtains when needed, and calm when not.
Color And Ground
Material work runs quiet and exact. The envelope is repaired against rising damp, beams and joists are stripped back to their original layer, and walls release a deeper plaster tone with faint painted borders. Underfoot, a continuous coarse concrete with exposed aggregate carries through, punctuated by small ceramic inlays that trace geometry, expansion joints, and the entrances to each courtyard.
In the end, daylight moves, air drifts, and the plan steadies the day. Color marks the useful things, concrete holds the ground, and the old axis finds new life.
Photography by Milena Villalba
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