Dream Houses is a curated exploration of domestic architecture in which vision, craft and innovation converge. Each residence is shaped by light, materiality and intent, revealing homes that transcend function to become expressions of a deeply personal yet enduring way of living.
At the foot of the Sant Llorenç del Munt i l’Obac Natural Park in Matadepera, 30–50 km northwest of Barcelona, Casa Sota la Mola by Twobo does not so much occupy the landscape as seek to become part of its chromatic and topographical logic, drawing on Alvar and Elissa Aalto’s Muuratsalo Experimental House. Cast in pigmented salmon concrete, the monochromatic dwelling takes its colour from the reddish earth and conglomerate rock of the surrounding terrain, while its fragmented volumes follow the mountain’s profile, attenuating the building’s presence within the landscape. Conceived as a family retreat rooted in childhood memories, the house transforms colour, materiality, light and topography into an architecture of belonging.
The project is part of a personal geography. Designed for a couple and their two young children, the house occupies a site in which one of the owners spent childhood summers. After fifteen years in Australia, where outdoor living had become an integral part of everyday life, the family returned to the landscape of these earlier memories. The decision to build here was therefore not simply a question of retreat but of reconnection: an attempt to transform a remembered territory into a contemporary domestic environment.
For Twobo, this emotional premise becomes an architectural method. Reading the site through its topography, colour, vegetation and light, the architectural approach recalls Kenneth Frampton’s notion of critical regionalism: an architecture that does not reproduce local forms, but allows the specific conditions of a site—its climate, materiality, topography and culture—to participate in the making of form.
The setting is particularly charged. The Sant Llorenç del Munt i l’Obac Natural Park occupies part of the Catalan Pre-Coastal Range, encompassing the mountain massifs of Sant Llorenç del Munt and Serra de l’Obac.
Its landscape is marked by reddish conglomerate formations, steep cliffs, caves, deeply incised valleys and Mediterranean forests of pine, holm oak and cork oak. Above it all rises La Mola, the park’s highest summit, at approximately 1,104 metres, crowned by the Romanesque monastery of Sant Llorenç del Munt.
Here, geology is not merely scenery: it establishes the visual and material identity of the territory.
Twobo responds to this condition through two complementary strategies: fragmentation and monochromy.
The first reduces the scale of the architectural object. Rather than placing a singular, autonomous volume upon the sloping site, the house is divided into smaller masses that respond to the terrain individually. The strategy recalls Alvar and Elissa Aalto’s Muuratsalo Experimental House, designed between 1952 and 1954 on the rocky island of Muuratsalo in Finland. There, the L-shaped main building, guest wing and enclosing walls form an almost provisional assemblage around an internal courtyard. The courtyard is the spatial centre of the composition, while the different elements negotiate between enclosure, vegetation, rock and distant landscape. Yet the relationship between the two projects is more profound than a formal resemblance. Muuratsalo was conceived by Aalto as an experimental laboratory in which architecture could test materials, construction techniques and spatial relationships in direct proximity to nature. Its courtyard walls became a field of approximately fifty experiments in brick and ceramic pattern, while the building itself remained closely tied to the rocky terrain.
Twobo translates this experimental attitude into a Mediterranean domestic architecture. As Pablo, Alberto and María explain: “In Alvar Aalto’s famous Muuratsalo Experimental House, he begins with a central element – the hearth, the courtyard – and fragments the house in order to merge it with the landscape. From him, we learn that fragmentation can be a way of disappearing and of bringing architecture and nature together.”
In Casa Sota la Mola, fragmentation therefore operates not simply as a compositional device but as a strategy of disappearance.
By dividing the house into volumes, Twobo interrupts the reading of a singular building mass. Each fragment can adjust itself to the terrain, producing a softer relationship between architecture and topography. The house becomes less object-like and more geological in its reading: a sequence of masses, voids and thresholds embedded within the slope.
The internal courtyard intensifies this idea. Rather than functioning as an enclosed garden inserted into the house, it becomes the hinge around which domestic life is organised.
The volumes turn towards it while simultaneously opening outward towards vegetation, sunlight and views. In this sense, the project belongs to what American landscape architect James Corner describes as an understanding of landscape not as passive scenery but as an active spatial and cultural medium, continuously produced through relationships between material conditions, perception and inhabitation.
The landscape is not outside the architecture; it participates in its organisation.
The second strategy is colour. The house is cast in a muted salmon-pink concrete whose pigmentation runs through the material itself. Colour is therefore not applied as a final layer but embedded within the architecture, extending across walls, structural surfaces and openings.
The resulting monochromy produces a peculiar visual condition: rather than distinguishing individual architectural elements, it suppresses their hierarchy.
This is where the chromatic strategy becomes more than an aesthetic gesture. As Australian architect Sandra Kaji-O’Grady observes in her study of monochromatic architecture, the single-colour environment can alter both the perceptual and cultural reading of space, creating an immersive condition in which colour becomes an active architectural instrument rather than decoration. In Sota la Mola, monochromy performs precisely this operation. Salmon concrete does not simply give the house an identity; it dissolves distinctions within the building, allowing wall, volume, opening and threshold to be read as variations of one material field.
The colour also establishes a conversation with the geological ground. The reddish tone of the concrete recalls the conglomerate and soil of the surrounding mountain without attempting to mimic them literally. It is an act of chromatic correspondence rather than imitation. The architecture adopts the landscape’s register while remaining unmistakably contemporary.
The effect is particularly powerful as light changes throughout the day. The salmon surface absorbs the warm afternoon sun, while the surrounding vegetation introduces a contrasting register of deep greens.
Architecture and landscape are thus held together through a restrained chromatic tension: red against green, warmth against shade, mineral against vegetal.
Materiality reinforces this sensory relationship. The pigmented concrete retains the imprint of the timber formwork, leaving the traces of construction visible on the surface. The resulting texture gives the monolithic material an unexpectedly tactile quality. It is not the polished abstraction of concrete as industrial product, but concrete carrying evidence of its making. In Casa Sota la Mola, the roughness of the formwork, the mass of the concrete and the changing intensity of natural light ensure that monochromy never becomes flatness.
The single colour contains innumerable variations of shadow, texture and atmosphere.
The volta catalana, or Catalan vault, further deepens this material continuity. Used to define the principal rooms, the vaulted structure introduces a sense of permanence and craft into the otherwise contemporary composition. Its curved surfaces establish continuity between ceiling, wall and structure, producing interiors that feel simultaneously primitive and refined. The vault is less a stylistic quotation than a tectonic gesture: an architecture whose character emerges from the relationship between construction and space.
The house occupies a single storey and is divided into two principal volumes. One accommodates the communal life of the family—the kitchen, dining and living spaces—while the other, organised around the courtyard, contains the bedrooms and more private functions. The arrangement establishes two contrasting atmospheres.
The living volume is elevated towards the afternoon sun and opens itself to the views. It becomes the extroverted part of the house, oriented towards light, landscape and family gathering. The private volume is more contained, its courtyard creating a cooler and more protected centre. Rather than framing distant architecture, its openings privilege the immediate presence of trees, rock and sky.
The distinction between interior and exterior consequently becomes deliberately unstable. Large openings allow the green of the surrounding vegetation to enter the house, producing a chromatic counterpoint to the red surfaces. In the private areas, green ceramics intensify this dialogue, their colour echoing the cork and holm oaks beyond. The landscape is repeatedly translated into the interior through colour, reflection, texture and light.
In the inner courtyard, facing the master bedroom, during excavation, a large rock was uncovered and retained rather than removed. It now forms part of the courtyard walls, becoming an unexpected fragment of the original geology within the domestic space. Instead of treating construction as an act of clearing the site, the architects allow the site to interrupt the architecture. The house does not simply minimise its environmental footprint visually; it allows the existing ground to remain materially present. The original terrain has been altered only where necessary to accommodate the building, while vegetation is largely preserved. Architecture emerges through negotiation rather than replacement.
There is, finally, something deeply domestic in this apparent withdrawal. The house does not seek monumentality. Its ambition is almost inverse: to become quiet enough for the landscape and family life to become perceptually stronger. Fragmentation reduces the building’s scale; monochromy reduces its visual hierarchy; the courtyard produces an inward centre; the openings frame vegetation rather than architecture. Each decision diminishes the autonomy of the architectural object.
What remains is a house that seems to have been drawn out of the terrain rather than placed upon it.
Twobo’s Casa Sota la Mola is a house that accepts the landscape as a condition of its own existence.
Its salmon concrete takes on the colour of the earth; its fragmented masses follow the mountain; its courtyard preserves a piece of rock; its interiors register the green of the surrounding forest. Between mineral and vegetal, memory and contemporary life, enclosure and openness, the house constructs a quiet architecture of belonging.
About Twobo
Twobo was founded in 2007 in Barcelona by María Pancorbo, Alberto Twose and Pablo Twose. Their creative process is meticulous, daring and consistently rooted in craftsmanship. Hand drawing and model-making are central to their methodology – techniques that require time, patience and dedication.
Over the years, Twobo has received numerous awards and recognitions. These include a special mention at the biennial Maresme Regional Architecture Exhibition for six houses in Cabrera de Mar, which were also recognised at the Ascer Ceramics Awards; the Vallès Exhibition Award for Casa Tangram; and the Girona Regional Architecture Awards. Since 2010, Twobo has been one of the principal publishers of Engawa, an architecture magazine focused on research and theory.
Facts & Credits
Project title Casa Sota la Mola
Typology Architecture, Residential
Location Matadepera, Barcelona, Spain
Site area 250 sqm
Status Completed, 2023
Architecture Twobo Arquitectura
Project team María Pancorbo, Alberto Twose and Pablo Twose
Collaborators Claudia Canalda, Sara Alves, Javi Comadrán, Víctor Díaz-Asensio, Ourania Chamilaki
Construction Prismatic 360 + Coterm (facilities)
Photography José Hevia ⓒ
Bibliography
Corner, J. (ed.) (1999) Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.
Frampton, K. (1983) ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance’, in Foster, H. (ed.) The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press.
Kaji-O’Grady, S. (2015) ‘From Monopoly to Jean Nouvel’s Serpentine Pavilion: Monochromatic Buildings and Rooms’, Architectural Theory Review, 19(2), pp. 141–153.