On a hillside above Gijón in Asturias, Madrid practice HANGHAR assembles Casa Guadalupe, a 120-square-metre steel house whose main frame rose on site in under 48 hours.
Gijón climbs into hills that hold onto their farming past. The plots above the Asturian city read as rural before residential, still organised by the agricultural shed and the casa mariñana, the two building types that have long set the scale of this territory. Casa Guadalupe borrows from both: a single pitched volume, a direct footing on the ground, a plain way of building carried into a dry, bolted-together system. HANGHAR keeps the silhouette a neighbour would recognise and swaps almost everything behind it.
The 120-square-metre house arrived built. Fabricated whole in a workshop, it was carried in on semi-trailers and put together on the plot with the main structure standing inside 48 hours, a schedule conventional construction rarely matches. Rather than cut the sloping site flat, HANGHAR set the house on a line of steel piers that follow the existing grade, keeping earthwork and disturbance to a minimum. The building hovers a step above the grass, its underside open to the wind off the bay.
Everything in the palette answers the humid, shifting Asturian climate through constructive logic rather than decoration. A galvanized steel frame carries a ventilated facade of white sandwich panels over an insulated cavity, capped by a corrugated metal roof whose deep eaves throw shade across the terraces. Chain-link mesh fills the balustrades; galvanized grating forms the walkways and porch decks; sliding panels in the same white board close the openings or slide back to frame the estuary. A single downpipe chain hangs from the eave, catching rain the way a farm building would.
Inside, the register warms. Poured floors in a pale blue-grey run under white walls that climb into the pitched ceiling, and freestanding volumes of sapele line the kitchen and screen the bedrooms, their vertical grain the one indulgence in a house otherwise built from industrial stock. Sheer roller blinds turn the low sun into a wash of amber. The furniture keeps company with the structure without competing: Aalto's webbed chairs, an Eames lounge, a Noguchi paper lantern hung in the tallest bay.
Room2030 fabricated the house whole and delivered it built, the contractor's workshop absorbing the finishes and the timeline that a wet, on-site build would spread over months. What ties it to this plot is the ground it stands on. The steel piers step down the slope to keep the volume level, earthwork limited to the footings, and from below the frame stays open to the wind off the bay, the red hedges of the gardens falling away toward Gijón and the water.
