Casa Oktade is a single-story residence in Godella, near Valencia, organized as an L-shaped field of offset rectangular volumes beneath a continuous horizontal roof. Its architecture relies on depth, shade, and material restraint rather than formal excess, using cantilevered slabs, textured lime render, stone supports, and carefully framed openings to establish a measured relationship between domestic life, Mediterranean light, and the garden landscape.
Casa Oktade Technical Information
- Architects: Garrido Studio
- Location: Calle PAI CM Moreras 27, Godella, Valencia, Spain
- Gross Area: 369.01 m2 | 3972 Sq. Ft.
- Completion Year: 2025
- Photographs: Courtesy of Garrido Studio
The house is conceived through horizontality, shade, and continuity with the garden, so that light, air, and daily life can unfold in a calm relationship with the Mediterranean climate.
– Juan Jose Garrido Balaguer
Horizontal Massing and the Mediterranean Ground
Casa Oktade is set on a relatively flat suburban parcel in Campolivar and adopts horizontality as its primary architectural instrument. Rather than building upward, the project extends laterally across the site through an L-shaped arrangement of offset rectangular volumes. This low profile establishes a deliberate relationship with the ground, one that privileges continuity, measured expansion, and long sightlines over vertical display. The composition reads less as an isolated object than as a field condition shaped by slab edges, voids, and shadow bands.
Deep cantilevered roof planes are central to this strategy. Their projection creates a layered silhouette in which upper and lower planes are separated by dense horizontal shadow, giving the mass a sense of weight held in suspension. In Mediterranean conditions, this is not only a formal decision but a climatic one. The projecting slabs temper solar exposure, protect glazed surfaces, and produce semi-covered thresholds that mediate between enclosed rooms and outdoor occupation. The resulting architecture derives its presence from depth and thermal intelligence rather than from overt monumentality.
The abstraction of the massing is moderated by site-specific material cues. A warm sand-toned lime render softens the geometry and catches light through its hand-worked surface, while stacked stone piers and wall segments mark points of support and contact with the terrain. Preserved umbrella pines, cypress, and olive trees interrupt the purity of the volumes with irregular vegetal silhouettes, preventing the house from becoming too self-contained. The pool and garden are not residual exterior amenities but part of the spatial composition, extending the building’s horizontal order into the landscape.
Plan Organization, Privacy, and Spatial Sequencing
The ground floor plan is organized with notable clarity. Day spaces occupy the more open edge of the house, where living, dining, and kitchen functions are oriented toward the garden and pool to the east and south. This arrangement maximizes light and reinforces the idea of domestic life unfolding in close contact with exterior space. The relationship between these rooms is fluid without collapsing into complete indeterminacy, allowing each function to retain legibility while participating in a larger communal field.
The night wing is more controlled and introverted. Three secondary bedrooms, each with an en-suite bathroom, are aligned along the quieter edge of the plan, while the principal suite is set apart with its own dressing room and bath. This distribution creates acoustic and visual separation from the social areas, establishing privacy through planning rather than excessive compartmentalization. The study, placed near the day zone yet distinct from it, works as an intermediate program that acknowledges contemporary domestic patterns of work and retreat.
Entry plays a significant role in this sequencing. The house does not move directly from exterior access to the living space. Instead, the foyer is conceived as a transitional chamber organized around a prominent stair and illuminated from above by skylights. This vertical interruption within an otherwise horizontal composition gives the entrance a moment of compression and release. A framed view toward the garden at the end of the sequence immediately clarifies the house’s internal logic, where movement is oriented by light and landscape. The detached pavilion containing the outdoor kitchen, changing rooms, and technical spaces further refines the plan by keeping service and leisure functions close to the pool while avoiding congestion within the primary residential volume.
Light, Materiality, and the Construction of Atmosphere
Daylight is handled here as a spatial substance rather than as a neutral necessity. Large openings pull garden light deep into the living spaces, while the entrance hall receives a different, more concentrated luminosity from above. This interplay between frontal and zenithal light establishes varied atmospheric registers within a relatively restrained palette of forms. Deep roof overhangs ensure that illumination is filtered and oblique rather than uniformly exposed, allowing shadow to articulate edges, recesses, and moments of thickness.
The exterior material system is built on a controlled tension between planar continuity and tactile interruption. Lime-rendered surfaces read as broad, matte fields, but their close texture reveals trowel marks and subtle irregularities that animate the facade under changing sun conditions. Against this softness, stacked stone elements appear denser and more granular, often positioned where the cantilever seems to land. These stone-clad anchors are not decorative accents. They intensify the legibility of load, support, and span, making the house’s compositional balance easier to read.
Inside, the material language shifts toward continuity and domestic quiet. Oak cabinetry, pale flooring, and light-toned surfaces produce a warm but subdued interior register that does not compete with the changing light from outside. Flush doors and reduced detailing reinforce the sense of calm by minimizing visual noise. The result is an atmosphere constructed through restraint, where material selection supports a slower spatial rhythm and allows environmental effects such as light, shadow, and air movement to remain perceptible.
Structure, Envelope, and Environmental Performance
The architectural language of Casa Oktade depends on a structural system capable of sustaining long horizontal spans and pronounced overhangs. Reinforced concrete, combined with bidirectional waffle slabs on braced footings, provides this capacity while preserving the apparent simplicity of the volumes. The deep cantilevers, therefore, emerge from a disciplined structural logic rather than from formal exaggeration. A punctual steel column at the corner of the principal bedroom resolves a critical support condition with minimal visual interruption, allowing one of the more exposed corners of the composition to remain open and light.
The envelope combines masonry walls with continuous insulation, plasterboard linings, and selected areas of stone cladding or lime render. This mixed facade system maintains formal clarity while improving thermal stability and reducing unwanted heat gain. High-performance aluminum frames with low-emissivity double glazing support airtightness and wind resistance, but the project does not rely exclusively on sealed enclosure. Openings are positioned to enable cross ventilation, making passive air movement an active component of daily comfort in a warm climate.
Environmental measures are integrated into the architecture with little visual friction. Green and gravel-finished flat roofs, double waterproofing membranes, and drainage layers address thermal performance and water management at the building-section level. Photovoltaic panels and aerothermal systems are installed on the roof as part of the technical upper layer, rather than as visible attachments that compete with the house’s formal order. In this sense, the building’s environmental strategy is inseparable from its architectural one: shade, mass, insulation, air movement, and protected exterior rooms all work together to shape how the house is inhabited.
About Garrido Studio
Garrido Studio, also identified as JAX Architecture S.L., is a Valencia-based architecture practice led by Juan Jose Garrido Balaguer. The studio works across the Valencia region on residential, interior, and contextual architecture, with an approach centered on honest material expression, Mediterranean climate-driven design, and quietly contemporary form.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Architect: Juan José Garrido Balaguer (COACV núm. 7.156)
- Construction company: Proyecto Constructivo Ibola S.L.
- Other contributors: Topographic survey by Topourbem S.L.U.
- Other contributors: Geotechnical study by Aplicaciones Geotecnicas y Ciencias del Subsuelo S.L. (AGCS)
