Casa Refugio is a 450 square meter house in Santiago de Queretaro, Mexico, organized as a protected brick enclosure around courtyards, gardens, and a vertically connected domestic interior. Its compact footprint uses light, planting, and sectional relationships to negotiate privacy within a densifying suburban setting.
Casa Refugio Technical Information
- Architects: Taller Segovia Molina
- Location: Santiago de Queretaro, Queretaro, Mexico
- Gross Area: 450 m2 | 4,844 Sq. Ft.
- Project Years: 2026
- Photographs: © Zaickz Moz and Cesar Belio
The house is designed so that the levels remain connected visually, acoustically, and through daily presence.
– Daniel Segovia Molina
A Private Urban Envelope
Casa Refugio addresses a suburban condition in which detached houses are increasingly pressed together by treating the street facade as a protective urban edge. The upper portion of the elevation is almost entirely blind, built from pale Roman-format brick laid in tight courses. Rather than reading as a collection of individual units, the masonry forms a continuous, lightly striated surface whose shallow horizontal shadows register changing weather and sun angles. This near-absence of openings rejects the conventional suburban reliance on frontage as display and instead establishes privacy as the initial spatial premise.
The street boundary is not entirely abrupt. A deep board-formed concrete lintel lifts the brick mass above a recessed ground-level forecourt containing the entrance and parking area. Within this shaded threshold, a solid oak pivot door introduces warmth against the muted masonry and concrete, while a curved brick drum redirects movement into the house. The sequence delays visual access to the interior, allowing arrival to unfold through compression, shadow, and material contact before the living spaces open toward the rear garden.
This contrast between an opaque public face and a planted interior recasts the house as a series of protected outlooks rather than a building oriented toward distant views. The site is only 250 square meters, yet the design avoids treating its limited exterior area as residual space. Gardens, voids, and terraces become the primary visual field for domestic life, while the street remains a deliberately controlled boundary.
Courtyards, Gardens, and Domestic Light
Landscape is dispersed across Casa Refugio through a network of rear gardens, narrow courts, planted bedroom bays, and interior voids. This distribution gives each level an immediate relationship with vegetation without requiring a large centralized garden. At ground level, the social rooms face a contained rear garden enclosed by brick walls. A multi-stem tree rises from a circular field of radially laid brick paving, while informal elements such as a concrete seat, bird feeder, and low planting reinforce the garden as an inhabited domestic room rather than a decorative backdrop.
The double-height courtyard beside the family study demonstrates how a constrained gap can become an environmental instrument. Dense planting, loose gravel, climbing vegetation, and perforated brickwork occupy a tall and narrow space between the house volumes. Full-height glazing places the study directly against this green enclosure, where a long oak work surface runs parallel to the courtyard. The room is defined by a precise opposition: one continuous desk, one continuous concrete wall, and one continuous glazed edge facing vegetation. The court moderates daylight while bringing the planting’s seasonal growth into the daily routine of work and study.
Light is treated as a spatial medium rather than as uniform illumination. Sheer linen curtains across the dining room soften the rear garden into a luminous field, reducing the distinction between enclosure and view. Elsewhere, circular oculi, roof skylights, and planted courts produce localized atmospheres of shade, reflection, and direct sun. A circular skylight over the bath and smaller openings in corridors establish distinct moments of orientation, while the changing position of daylight makes the house responsive to both time of day and seasonal shifts.
The Stair as Spatial and Social Infrastructure
The central stair organizes the house in section. Encased within a tall barrel vault of board-formed concrete, it rises through the full height of the dwelling as a continuous vertical chamber. The grain of the timber formwork follows the walls and turns across the vault, giving the concrete a directional texture that emphasizes ascent. Thick oak treads cantilever from the concrete enclosure with open risers, allowing light and air to pass through the stair rather than treating it as a closed circulation shaft.
Its role exceeds circulation. The stair aligns with the study, internal gardens, and upper-level workspace to maintain visual and acoustic contact between the house’s different levels. Bedrooms gain privacy through their placement and planted edges, but they remain connected to shared life below. The workspace near the primary suite overlooks the double-height living volume, while the study remains visible from the ascending stair. The sectional arrangement makes domestic activity perceptible across floors without relying on a single open-plan room.
The ascent culminates in a semicircular opening onto the roof terrace, where the concrete vault frames brick parapets and open sky. This transition gives the route a clear spatial destination. Smaller circulation spaces receive similar attention: a corridor between a brick wall and oak wardrobes is punctuated by a circular skylight that projects a concentrated disc of daylight onto the dark stone floor. Such apertures mark movement through the house by giving transitional zones their own atmospheric identity.
Material Continuity and the Roof as an Occupied Landscape
The interior relies on a restrained material palette of sand-colored brick, board-formed concrete, pale oak, and dark veined stone. This continuity gives the compact house a coherent material order while allowing different construction techniques to define specific conditions. Brick shifts from the woven enclosure of the street facade to textured interior walls and perforated courtyard screens. Concrete forms lintels, walls, vaults, and the curved enclosure of the primary bathroom. Oak is used for doors, wardrobes, shelving, desks, stair treads, and window seats, introducing a warmer and more tactile register within the mineral framework.
Curved geometry provides a recurring counterpoint to the otherwise linear plan. The entry drum, barrel-vaulted stair, arched garden openings, circular skylights, and curved concrete volume around the primary bathroom establish a family of forms across different scales. In the primary suite, the board-formed concrete enclosure partially conceals the bathroom without relying on a conventional orthogonal partition. It directs movement around the bathing area while preserving spatial continuity between bedroom and bathroom. Above the freestanding tub, a circular skylight casts diffuse light onto the curved concrete surface, making the room’s geometry legible through changing illumination.
At roof level, the house’s concealed light-catching devices emerge as a collection of autonomous built forms. Tapered brick drums, glazed skylight plinths, the long barrel vault, steel flues, and low brick structures occupy the terrace as a small constructed landscape. Rather than treating the roof as leftover technical space, the design turns it into an area for play, rest, and informal gathering. The roof reveals the house’s sectional logic: the elements that shape light and enclosure below become visible objects above, linking interior atmosphere to the building’s external form.
About Taller Segovia Molina
Taller Segovia Molina is the architecture firm behind Casa Refugio, directed by Daniel Segovia Molina with Mariana Cruz, Sofia Rodriguez, and Tania Martinez. For Casa Refugio, the firm developed a dwelling organized around privacy, flexibility, family life, courtyards, gardens, and visual and acoustic connections between levels.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Structural engineers: Andres Casal
- MEP consultants: Alan Cruz Bautista, Arturo Ortiz Arellano
- Landscape designers: Matorral
- Construction company: Taller Segovia Molina
- Other contributors: Photography by Zaickz Moz and Cesar Belio; architectural visualization by Guillermo Zapata
