A compact single-family house in San Pedro Garza García explores the 5 by 20 meter historic lot as a sectional and chromatic landscape. Organized around a central courtyard with patios, planted terraces, and a rooftop belvedere, the project calibrates a heritage-facing street elevation with a sequence of interior rooms defined by robust red surfaces, tezontle, and vegetation that temper light, heat, and privacy while directing attention to the surrounding mountains.
Ederlezi Technical Information
- Architects1-4: Práctica Arquitectura
- Location: San Pedro Garza García, Nuevo León, Mexico
- Gross Area: 160 m2 | 1,722 Sq. Ft.
- Project Years: 2019 – 2022
- Photographs: © César Béjar, © Apertura Arquitectónica, © Dove Dope
We used the narrow plot to articulate a sequence of courtyards and sectional shifts that filter the street and orient daily life toward the mountain.
– David Martínez Ramos
Ederlezi Photographs
Context, Plot, and Heritage Constraints
On a 5 by 20 meter parcel within the historic center of San Pedro Garza García, the house engages a compact urban grain where party walls, shallow setbacks, and conservation rules determine the public face. The façade is disciplined, using a calibrated base, measured openings, and controlled relief to meet heritage guidance without replicating past styles. This restraint concentrates expression within the interior, where massing and color undertake the primary design work.
The built program of 160 square meters is assembled as an accretive sequence rather than a single volume. Privacy from the street is established early, yet the roof terrace opens to 360-degree views of hills and ridgelines, positioning the domestic itinerary between enclosure and outlook. The project reads as a vertical lookout in a low-rise context, but one whose height is absorbed through sectional steps and terraces rather than through a singular tower.
Narrow width demands precision in the placement of cores, stairs, and apertures. Services and circulation are pushed to the party walls to preserve a continuous interior depth, while openings are tuned to street and courtyard pressures. The result is a measured street presence that addresses conservation parameters and an interior world organized to support shade, airflow, and layered visual connections.
Courtyard Plan and Dynamic Section
The plan is anchored by a central courtyard that divides the project into two primary volumes. Front-of-lot spaces contain the entrance, garage, and a double-height guest room with a mezzanine and stairs to the roof terrace. Toward the rear, the living, dining, and kitchen open to patios and a planted terrace, and the main bedroom occupies the quietest zone. Services and circulation lines trace the party walls, keeping the middle of the plan clear and allowing rooms to borrow light and air across the courtyard.
A rational grid of square modules structures the plan, yet the section introduces variability. Steps, platforms, and layered thresholds compress and release space along the length of the house. A red zigzag element works as a street-side containment and guard, registering the stair and the shifting datum lines while mediating views from outside to inside. Operable gates overlap at key points, allowing the residents to tune airflow and privacy hour by hour.
Patios stitch microclimates along the sequence, enabling cross ventilation from street to courtyard to rear terrace. The double-height guest space acts as a lung that collects warm air high, while the blue boundary patio at the back resets the scale, reflecting light and extending the living spaces outward. Across these episodes, sightlines remain diagonal rather than direct, which preserves privacy without interrupting environmental continuity.
Material Atmospheres and Landscape
A consistent chromatic strategy binds structure, surface, and planting. Robust red interior envelopes, tezontle in garden planes and door infill, and dense vegetation set up a controlled contrast that recalls the project’s name, Ederlezi, and its association with seasonal renewal. The mineral reds provide mass and depth, tempering glare and absorbing heat peaks, while plants cool and soften edges through evapotranspiration.
The envelope references regional precedents in northwestern Mexico through a defined base course, the proportional logic of openings, and thickened walls that read as carved rather than assembled. Contemporary detailing keeps profiles crisp, minimizing ornament and letting shadow and color articulate relief. The red surfaces are balanced by the blue patio at the property’s edge, which modulates reflected light and delineates a climatic threshold at the rear.
Landscape is treated as a program. Courtyards, terraces, and planter ledges act as social rooms and environmental buffers, mediating between direct sun and shade. Tezontle’s porosity supports drainage and root health, while its color unifies floors, thresholds, and door planes. The outdoor rooms extend interior atmospheres without collapsing them, maintaining the legibility of each stratum while contributing to overall thermal comfort.
Typological Exploration and Privacy
The long, narrow lot is approached as a stereotomic exercise of perforation and excavation. Rather than stacking rooms linearly, the design cuts, carves, and opens the volume to choreograph movement and frame everyday rituals. Voids set pace and orientation, and the section uses small height shifts to register transitions between public, semi-public, and private zones.
Privacy is established through calibrated thresholds rather than heavy separation. Street, zaguán, courtyard, and interior rooms form a sequence of filters that keep the house open yet controlled. Operable layers, including overlapping gates and screened apertures, allow porosity across the courtyards and between levels without overexposure to the street.
Heritage constraints are used as a framework for invention. The disciplined façade, bounded massing, and directed vistas organize the domestic realm toward the mountain, culminating at the rooftop terrace where the city fabric yields to the larger geography. Within this controlled envelope, the project demonstrates how a protected urban context can still host a precise exploration of climate, color, and typology.
Ederlezi Plans
Ederlezi Image Gallery
About Práctica Arquitectura
Based in Monterrey, Mexico, Práctica Arquitectura was founded in 2011 and focuses on architecture as a tool for dialogue between contemporary design and cultural heritage. Their practice explores spatial, tectonic, and climatic strategies rooted in local context, emphasizing typological innovation and material honesty to enrich lived experience across scales and programs.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Architect: David Martínez Ramos
- Design Team: Alejandro Gutiérrez
- Landscape Designers: Oswaldo Zurita
- Construction Company: GC3
