On the outskirts of Barcelona, we are developing a new-build home shaped by a simple idea: a house organised around a courtyard.
The starting point looks backwards as much as forwards. Roman villas, Mediterranean courtyard houses and rural Catalan buildings all understood something fundamental about living in a hot climate: shade matters, thermal mass matters, and the spaces between rooms can matter as much as the rooms themselves. Our proposal brings those ideas into a contemporary, low-energy home built predominantly from rammed earth.
The house sits low against the hillside, with a natural swimming pond and Mediterranean planting reaching the rammed earth walls. RISE Design Studio.
Rather than treating the house as a single object sitting in its surroundings, the plan is arranged around a protected central courtyard. The rooms form its edges. Deep covered thresholds create a shaded perimeter, somewhere between inside and outside, and large openings let the main living spaces extend into the courtyard while timber screens provide privacy and control sunlight. At the centre, planting and a mature tree cast shade and help establish a cooler microclimate.
The arrangement has old roots. The Roman domus was often organised around an atrium or peristyle garden, and variations of the idea have continued across Spain and the wider Mediterranean for centuries. The courtyard gives privacy and protection, but it also becomes the social heart of the home. We are not trying to recreate a Roman villa. We are interested in why these buildings worked so well, and in applying those principles to contemporary life.
The central courtyard, shaded by a mature tree, with timber shutters and a small water bowl at its heart. RISE Design Studio.
Rammed earth gives the house much of its character. Earth is compacted in layers within formwork to make substantial walls, and once the formwork comes off the process stays visible: subtle horizontal strata, shifts in colour and small imperfections that show how the building was made. We like that honesty. Rather than covering the structure with another material to make it look finished, the wall itself is the finished surface.
The result feels heavy and grounded. Openings are cut deeply into thick walls, sunlight catches the texture of the earth, and the depth of the construction creates shadow. As the light moves through the day, the character of the house moves with it.
Timber shutters open from a deep rammed earth threshold to frame the view towards the Mediterranean. RISE Design Studio.
The thickness of the walls is not just an aesthetic decision. Barcelona's climate is increasingly defined by summer overheating, so a low-energy house here has to do more than limit heat loss in winter. It needs to stay comfortable through long spells of intense heat without becoming dependent on mechanical cooling.
Rammed earth contributes significant thermal mass, which helps moderate swings in internal temperature. Material alone is never the whole answer, though. The environmental strategy comes from the combination of orientation, external shading, thermal mass, insulation, airtightness, natural ventilation and carefully controlled glazing. Deep roof overhangs keep high summer sun off the openings, and timber shutters let individual rooms respond through the day. The courtyard encourages cross ventilation, with openings on different sides of the plan letting cooler air move through the building when conditions allow. The ambition is a house that works with Barcelona's climate rather than constantly fighting it.
Looking from the living space across the courtyard, where deep covered thresholds blur the line between inside and outside. RISE Design Studio.
One of the most important parts of the design is the covered space around the courtyard, which is deliberately hard to describe as either interior or exterior. In summer it becomes an outdoor living room: shaded, protected and connected to the garden. In winter, the lower sun reaches further into the building.
These transitional spaces also give the architecture depth. Instead of a façade made mostly of walls and windows, there is a sequence: garden, then shade, then colonnade, then threshold, then room. That progression slows the experience of entering the house and creates places to sit, read, eat or simply escape the midday sun. It is architecture built less on objects and more on atmosphere.
While the courtyard creates an inward-looking world, the house is not completely introverted. One carefully positioned opening breaks through the enclosure and looks out towards the wider landscape and the Mediterranean beyond. From inside the courtyard, the view reads almost as a picture cut into the rammed-earth wall.
Moving towards it changes the experience again, as the compressed, shaded courtyard gives way to a much larger horizon: vegetation, distant hills, sky and sea. That relationship between enclosure and release has become an important part of the design. The house can feel private and protected without losing its connection to place.
We are keeping the material palette restrained. Rammed earth provides the dominant structure and surface, timber is used for shutters, screens and joinery, and stone and mineral finishes form the floors and external terraces. The planting is equally informal: Mediterranean grasses, shrubs, rocks and trees rather than manicured lawns.
The intention is that the house and garden should not read as two separate things. Plants are allowed to approach the walls, vegetation falls across roof edges, and courtyard planting interrupts the geometry of the architecture. Over time, weathering should make that relationship stronger.
There is sometimes an assumption that sustainable architecture requires increasingly complicated technology. Technology has its place, but some of the most useful environmental principles are remarkably old: courtyards, shade, thermal mass, cross ventilation, deep openings, shutters and trees. Buildings across the Mediterranean have used these devices for centuries because they respond directly to climate.
The opportunity for contemporary architecture is to combine that accumulated knowledge with what we now understand about building physics, airtightness, insulation, embodied carbon and energy performance. The result does not need to look traditional. It can be distinctly contemporary.
There is something intentionally quiet about this house. It is not trying to compete with its setting: the form is low and predominantly horizontal, the material comes visually from the ground, and much of the accommodation sits behind shadow, screens and vegetation. From outside, the building should feel almost embedded in its site. Inside, the experience becomes richer: the roughness of rammed earth against smooth floors, bright Mediterranean sunlight against deep shade, the enclosed courtyard against the distant sea.
The project is still developing, and details will change as we test the environmental strategy, the structure and the construction of the rammed-earth walls. The central idea should hold: a low-energy house built from earth, gathered around a courtyard, using shade, mass, planting and natural ventilation to make living in the Mediterranean climate more comfortable.
If you are thinking about a low-energy new build, in Spain or the UK, we'd be glad to talk it through. Please do get in touch.
→ Email us at architects@risedesignstudio.co.uk
→ Or call the studio on 020 3947 5886
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