Zicatela House by Ludwig Godefroy is a small weekend house located on top of a hill in front of Zicatela beach, in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico.
The main goal of the house was to give the owner a break from Mexico City's megalopolis and urban habits by coming to Oaxaca to enjoy the heat of the Mexican coast and the peaceful light.
This house responds to a double landscape. On one side in the background are the beach and the sea, on the other are the mountains and the agave fields, the plant that is used to make mezcal and tequila. This project has the unique characteristic of being a countryside house next to the sea, instead of a beach house.
The house is based on this duality, the duality of its surroundings, and it's able to respond to the mountains and be protective as a concrete fortress as well as a wide-open space; giving you the feeling to live outside in a garden, making the border between in and out disappear.
On a small plot of 300 m2, Zactela House is built according to a defensive architectural typology, where a wall surrounds the entire terrain and creates an entirely controlled environment on the inside, turning it into an open-sky fortress, with only one main view towards the sky, the only constant in the present.
"The house is a bunker on the outside, one of those massive concrete structures I used to see in Normandy -where I was born-, protecting a Mexican pyramid on the inside, one of those I see when I travel around Mexico, the country where I've been living and working for 10 years now" adds the architect.
