Set into the slope of Cap Martinet in Ibiza, Casa Gili House assembles whitewashed volumes, patios, and stepped terraces to calibrate sea views, shade, and airflow. The project works with the terrain through low retaining walls and compact rooms buffered by porches and pergolas, forming a finely tuned sequence of exterior and interior settings that respond to the island’s light, heat, and wind.
Casa Gili Technical Information
- Architects: Martínez Lapeña & Elías Torres
- Location: Cap Martinet, Santa Eulària des Riu, Ibiza, Spain
- Project Years: 1985 – 1987
- Photographs: © Lluís Casals
In a climate of excess light and salt-laden wind, we draw rooms as gradients of shade. Patios, porches, and narrow openings let the house breathe and cool while holding a measured view of the sea.
– Martínez Lapeña & Elías Torres
Coastline, Topography, and Climate Response
The house steps down the Cap Martinet hillside as a series of platforms that track the natural contours. Low retaining walls stabilize the slope without carving large cuts, and each room aligns with a terrace to keep floors near grade. This terrace-to-room pairing ties daily life to the horizon line, positioning views outward while preserving a continuous relationship with the ground.
Orientation and section work together to temper the sun and wind. Deep reveals and shaded porches draw cool air across compact, thermally massive interiors, while pergolas extend the usable envelope into the exterior as protected rooms. The arrangement prioritizes cross-ventilation and reduces reliance on mechanical cooling, using the hillside’s elevation to capture prevailing breezes and the roof overhangs to block the high summer sun.
Exterior walls and carefully placed windbreaks form a network of microclimates. Patios open to the sea for winter sun, while more enclosed courtyards serve summer routines with dense shade and reduced glare. This graduated system of shelter and exposure provides the house with seasonal adaptability, allowing occupants to recalibrate daily use without altering the underlying geometry.
Additive Form and Vernacular Continuities
The architecture reads as an accretion of whitewashed prisms, set apart just enough to let air and light circulate between them. Interstitial patios and narrow courts are not residual spaces but the primary figures of the plan, defining orientation, circulation, and program. The ensemble acknowledges rural Ibiza compounds, distilling their clustered composition into a precise geometric order.
Gaps between volumes register as calibrated voids. Some operate as porches that mediate entry, others as open-air rooms that anchor the day zone. The result is a plan with no single dominant space; instead, a family of exterior and semi-exterior places structures domestic life, adjusting to weather and time of day with minimal effort.
Flat roofs and parapets extend the house vertically, forming a habitable roofscape. Simple openings and protected stairs facilitate movement upward, transforming the upper planes into terraces that complete the section toward the sea. These elevated platforms offer cooler evening occupation and reinforce the additive logic, where the roof, court, and room share equal weight.
Thresholds, Sequence, and Domestic Landscape
The program is distributed into day and night zones around a set of patios, with circulation largely outdoors. Movement threads through shaded galleries, steps, and short ramps that shift orientation from side courtyards to distant coast. Each turn reframes the terrain, producing a measured sequence rather than a single panoramic gesture.
Thresholds are layered from door to porch to patio to pergola, compressing and releasing space while modulating light and temperature. Interior and exterior functions overlap at these edges: cooking, dining, and resting shift with shade, breeze, and time, making the house’s perimeter the most active field. Furniture and built-in benches reinforce this gradation, treating thresholds as rooms rather than margins.
Low walls, framed openings, and planting beds edit both the long prospect and the near-ground vegetation. These devices filter sea glare and control depth of field, drawing attention to the horizon while holding foreground intimacy. The domestic landscape is composed as a series of carefully adjusted view cones and sheltered pockets, balancing exposure with enclosure across the day.
Material System and Environmental Performance
A restrained palette supports performance and longevity. Thick masonry walls finished in limewash provide thermal mass and high reflectivity, limiting heat gain while keeping interior temperatures steady. Timber pergolas and ceramic flooring add tactile warmth, with surfaces that cool rapidly at night and require minimal maintenance.
Local stone forms plinths, steps, and terrace edges, tying the building to site geology and buffering erosion on the slope. Openings are small and deeply set, with shading projected outward to reduce glare from the water. This combination of reflectance, mass, and shade manages summer extremes without sealing the house from its climate.
Construction logic favors simple spans and repetitive elements that can be repaired or adapted over time. The house is designed to weather, not resist, with materials that patinate and details that tolerate expansion, salt, and dust. By aligning building technique with environmental forces, the project sustains performance through use and exposure rather than through isolation.
About Martínez Lapeña & Elías Torres
Martínez Lapeña & Elías Torres is an architecture studio based in Barcelona, Spain, founded in 1968 by José Antonio Martínez Lapeña and Elías Torres. Known for a contextual and material approach that balances form, landscape, and culture, the studio’s work explores Mediterranean traditions, climate responsiveness, and layered spatial systems through inventive geometry and precise detailing.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Architects: José Antonio Martínez Lapeña & Elías Torres Tur.
- Client / original owners: The Gili family (publishers Gustavo Gili)
