Casa R4 is the conversion of a former office building into a residence on a steep ravine site in Guadalajara, Mexico. Retaining the existing structural shell, the project reorganizes domestic life through five half-levels, planted courtyards, a triple-height void, and a material palette led by walnut, volcanic stone, and light marble.
Casa R4 Technical Information
- Architects: Manzo de Alba Taller
- Location: Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico
- Project Years: 2024
- Photographs: © Cesar Belio
The goal throughout the development of Casa R4 was to integrate different spaces, combining functionality, warmth, and harmony.
– Manzo de Alba Taller
Reworking an Office Shell Within a Ravine Landscape
Casa R4 begins with a condition often treated as an obstacle in residential conversion: a building conceived for another form of occupation. More than thirty years old and previously used as offices, the structure was retained rather than replaced. The intervention works through selective recovery and reorganization, preserving the shell while returning spatial significance to elements already latent in the building, including the entrance plaza, lower terrace, and triple-height courtyard.
The ravine site is the principal ordering condition. While the street facade remains restrained, the house opens progressively toward the tree canopy and descending terrain of the cañada. This asymmetry between urban frontage and landscape orientation gives the project its spatial logic. A white stucco volume, walnut pivot door, timber lattice screens, and grey recinto paving establish a compressed threshold at street level before the interior sequence turns toward planting, depth, and views.
A flight of steps mediates the approach to a small paved plaza. Recinto stone is laid among planted margins, while an existing tree canopy softens the hard edge of the entry. The composition is deliberately quiet, relying on the contrast between smooth render, visibly grained timber, rough-cut stone, and vegetated joints. Rather than presenting the house as an object to the street, the facade delays access to its more expansive relationship with the ravine.
Half-Levels as a Sectional Organizing System
The steep fall of the site is absorbed through five half-levels rather than conventional full-floor stacking. This sectional arrangement permits the house to follow the terrain while maintaining short visual and physical connections between rooms. The plan is therefore read less as a sequence of isolated floors than as a continuous descent through domestic programs, with each landing registering a distinct relationship to light, planting, and the ravine edge.
The two upper half-levels contain bedrooms and a family room, separating quieter spaces from the more public portions of the house below. Kitchen, dining, living, terrace, and bar areas occupy the lower levels, where they gain greater proximity to the site and garden. This distribution does not rely on strict enclosure alone. The elevation changes create degrees of privacy while preserving awareness of activity elsewhere in the house.
At the center, the stair is both circulation infrastructure and an architectural instrument for reading the section. Solid walnut treads project from a dark steel structure, with open risers allowing light and sightlines to pass between levels. Fine vertical steel rods form the balustrade, while a walnut handrail reconnects the stair to the extensive joinery elsewhere. A planted bed beneath the lower flight draws vegetation directly into the circulation core, and views through the stair screen link the landings to the dining room and ravine-facing glazing.
Courtyards, Voids, and the Internal Landscape
A triple-height courtyard beside the living room provides the project’s most consequential interior void. Daylight enters from above and falls through the full height of the space onto a planted bed, where a tree becomes the visual termination of the main social room. The courtyard is not treated as a residual lightwell. Its scale and vertical continuity allow it to act as a room-sized landscape element within the retained building shell.
Walnut lining rises around the lower portion of the courtyard walls, while white upper walls receive daylight from a high clerestory opening. This material shift emphasizes the void’s height and prevents the timber from feeling spatially heavy. The courtyard also establishes a measured relationship between domestic furnishing and vegetation. Seating, a stone table, and suspended lighting occupy the perimeter, allowing the planted center to remain legible as a living vertical volume rather than decorative greenery.
Smaller planted courtyards extend this strategy to rooms without direct exposure to the ravine. These inserts give internal spaces access to foliage, daylight, and changing seasonal conditions, reducing the opposition between enclosed room and exterior garden. Skylights, glazed openings, and planted thresholds work with the main stair void to produce visual continuity across the half-levels. The intervention consequently counters the density of the inherited office structure through subtraction, light, and carefully placed landscape.
Material Continuity and Domestic Atmosphere
Walnut is the principal material through which Casa R4 establishes continuity across a varied sequence of rooms. It forms concealed doors and wall linings in the entrance distributor, cabinetry in the kitchen and family room, wardrobes in the bedrooms, and the treads and handrail of the central stair. This repeated use gives the remodeling a coherent architectural register, particularly where new elements are inserted into the older shell.
A more differentiated palette balances the timber and identifies changing conditions of use. Light-toned marble appears in the entrance distributor and interior courtyard, where its reflective surface supports daylight circulation. Grey recinto stone grounds exterior patios, balconies, and the lower terrace, creating a durable surface appropriate to planted edges and open-air social areas. Oak flooring extends through bedrooms, living, dining, and kitchen spaces, shifting the house’s tactile character from mineral threshold to domestic interior.
Material transitions are especially pronounced at the inside-outside interfaces. Stone paving meets vegetation at the entrance and terrace, while timber-lined rooms open toward ravine planting through framed glazing. Celosia screens provide filtered light and visual permeability in the lower terrace, recalling a regional vocabulary of masonry latticework without reducing it to surface decoration. Wrought ironwork at the stair, detailed millwork, exposed stone, and planted beds collectively make movement through the house perceptible as a sequence of changing textures, light conditions, and degrees of enclosure.
About Manzo de Alba Taller
Manzo de Alba Taller is a Guadalajara-based architecture studio led by Barbara Manzo Garcia and Andres Rodolfo Hernandez de Alba. In Casa R4, the studio retained and remodelled an existing building shell, using half-levels, courtyards, planting, and material continuity to integrate functionality, warmth, and harmony.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Landscape designers: Entre Plantas. Team: Hugo Yanez.
- Construction company: Del Muro Arquitectura.
- Construction Company Team: Carlos Del Muro Barajas and Fernando Tejeda.
- Interior design: Kenya Rodriguez Estudio.
- Interior Design Team: Kenya Rodriguez, Jesus Sanchez Herrera, and Armando Quintana.
- Carpentry manufacturing: Madec Carpintería. Team: Omar Alvarez del Castillo and Melina Regalado.
- Photography and video: Cesar Belio.
