Bosque Nativo

Multifamily Housing

Bosque Nativo occupies a site on the Bogotá savanna, in Cundinamarca, between parcels the drawings still call Santa Lucía and Los Naranjos. This is cold country under a changeable sky, and the project takes that on without disguise: every house has a wood-burning fireplace, its metal flue running exposed up the side wall as one more piece of the composition.

The house is a two-storey volume of pressed brick with an asymmetric pitch cut out of its upper part. The gesture is not decorative: under the slope a deep double-height loggia opens up, and inside the pitched ceiling hands extra height to the upper rooms. In one, the bed sits under the slope facing a floor-to-ceiling window onto the treetops; in the children's room the extra height allowed a timber loft reached by a ladder of plank treads; above the upper hall a round skylight opens. Downstairs, kitchen, dining and living run as one continuous space towards the rear garden.

The group repeats the house along streets with planted medians and mature trees kept in the islands, so the row of gables is always seen through branches. Each house has a front garden and a covered driveway with a dark steel pergola, over articulated paving that lets water and grass through between the pieces; at the back, private gardens with a pergola and a swing seat. The project's documented palette is short and consistent: pressed brick of the "Capuchino H" reference, joinery and cabinetwork in pale timber, and a permeable paving system studied for the site works.