Tam House

English description provided by the architects.

Casa Tam is one more iteration in a sequence of rewritings. It is a comprehensive renovation of a house already expanded and altered on two prior occasions.

Located on the foothills of the Andes, on the outskirts of Santiago, the house raises its front façade—a gesture of urban character—while turning its back to the mountains.

Its roof mirrors the slope it faces, descending nearly to meet the ground and reducing the rear elevation to a thin, semi-buried strip intimately connected to the garden.

The other half, facing the street, accommodates service areas like the kitchen and the owner's ceramics workshop. Upstairs, two children's bedrooms are joined by a central shared studio.

In the lower level, the intervention uses reinforced concrete elements that tie together the various construction systems layered across the house's history.

The contrast between the different layers of the house's past remains visible in its interior. Shifts in material appear on surfaces, unified only by a coat of white paint.

Openings—cut through interior and exterior walls—reveal their original wall past, embracing the honesty of the intervention. Outside, the entire house is clad in a standing seam metal skin.

In front of the main façade, the only entirely new addition emerges: the kiln room. Clad in wood and painted white, it stands as the signature of this most recent reinvention—a plastic and programmatic trace of the latest rewriting of this home.