Grey House




Renovation of a Shepherd’s Hut in Cantabria, Spain


This project is the renovation of an abandoned shepherd’s hut in the Pas Valley as a summerhouse for an extended family. Due to the stringent building code and the degree of protection of the original construction (both the valley and the building type are under strict preservation regimes), it soon became apparent that the architectural intervention would be highly restrained. The project then became a subtle reinterpretation, a careful but playful process of disassembling and abstracting local housing typologies, siting strategies, and construction systems, of creating something different out of the misreading of those existing conditions.








© Jesús Vassallo, 2020