Spanish firm Grupo Aranea has designed this apartment to sit on the roof of a house belonging to the client's mother.
Casa Lude is built in Cehegín, a town of 16,000 inhabitants in the low mountains of Murcia, in southern Spain. Making the most of its privileged situation, Casa Lude is related to its environment in a particular way. Due to the density of the area it doesn’t open directly to the nearby facades but looks along the narrow streets to see the landscape, the Burete mountains and the San Agustin Hill.
With a budget of €120,000, Lude, as the owner is known, asked the architects to add a penthouse to the modest corner building where his mother and sister live on two separate floors. The architects stretched the new volume to occupy the maximum building envelope permitted. Instead of building up straight from the existing walls, they replaced the existing roof terrace with a new slab, supported on the walls below, that cantilevers over the facades to gain space. On this new platform they erected a lightweight steel-frame structure, and fitted an upper mezzanine within the zoning height limits, expanding the habitable area from 80 to 130sqm.
In spite of looking different to the other buildings of the neighbourhood, Casa Lude is as compact and introverted as them. Instead of a conventional layout of the rooms Casa Lude creates a unique, continuous and rich space on different levels with various heights and directions; a space that Lude fills with music. This space extends to the roof as a natural continuation of the interior life. It is a complex space full of light where a lot of secrets are hidden.
