Bought dark fixer-upper. Turned it into dream home (before/after)

[Applause] so wow that cast's so cool okay so it says that the castle was built in the 10th century it's a templar castle here's the church of this little town with around 50 houses this is the entry to the town this is the castle there is a tower one of the towers there was an arch here to enter the town and here this building locals told me this is the prison there was a prison in the castle until recently actually there's the entry of the castle this for a little while was also a border between christian counties to the north and muslim ones to the south until the 11th 12th century and now this is a unesco center for the preserve of the mediterranean biosphere you can see why in here the birds are really really out do you see these birds they though they're so cool why don't they all have birthdays they are welcoming us yeah raven bluebird i've heard sterling uh carrot all right yeah i don't think those are parrots i know um what are they called the black uh your stuff's up here already want some uh strawberry watermelon [Music] how [Music] [Music] um so what did you think when you saw this i mean our first reaction was probably two things the first one was obviously the site which is amazing and the views uh to the dam the location is i mean amazing with the castle and everything so the house is located in this really really privileged place [Applause] once we entered there was this kind of issue with there was like nine rooms that were not really connected with each other and not connected especially towards the outside so it's a house that has an amazing view but it doesn't kind of open to the view and then also there was this issue that some of the rooms were kind of low are you what i had in my room nice yeah that's also quite common in this rural constructions here that there was not this awareness of the surroundings probably these people lived off the land and they spent all their days you know farming somewhere or digging somewhere or something so when they got home they really didn't care about you know the views because they were always outside we have the last of the nine spaces which is probably just a place for storage or i mean not i don't think here was for grain storage but normally this was for grain basically to dry grain and so on so that's the more of course the most magical but only magical in the sense that you cannot do much things here unless it's your kids which they're getting taller and taller this is not inhabitable as it is now you know i mean you you can see it you cannot live here so that's where we have more fun in a way you know so this is the place we take all this roof out we'll try to keep as many tiles as possible and we make this higher by making this higher which and is this negotiation with the municipality that are allowing us to do this this will have the legal height to be inhabitable but also all the great qualities that we understand that this space has located on the corner of the house with a better sun orientation and of course the better views towards the town and also the dam we're making it one meter higher we keep these walls but on the base of these walls we start the new roof walls and therefore we have five big windows so you can ventilate the space but also have a great views to the side and all this structure is all timber obviously i mean that's why they used timber because it was a great structural element back then but also because it's lighter and therefore it's easier to just lift and cheaper to lift here in this height there's a moment where we talked about having it all glass yeah that didn't become possible yeah yeah yeah that's also the kind of the local constraint in terms of the municipality requirements again this is kind of a protected area because there's a natural par all these damn areas a natural park and therefore they want to keep the kind of character of the houses and they didn't like us to have these basically huge glass facades and that's why we had to kind of balance you know what the desires and the possibilities as always but we're pretty happy of the result bueno si yes and the out just gets in you know it's it's uh it's a view what uh i do like the feeling also that it feels very light because it's warden and it's very open you sort of project the views towards the natural landscape but then you have the rural you know aspect of it the the little village which is something very uh difficult to get something as consistent and as protected and big enough and not that big that's this thing a [Music] is you move your desk oh it's so much better in the corner god this is a great window i know isn't it nice especially here where there's nothing like stuff in the corner isn't that crazy you rarely get windows like that well at least i can see it's cool out there isn't it oh wait i just wait what oh i thought something was like surfing so basically this side even though it has all these views the way buildings traditionally built was more focused on also insulation right so small windows yeah yeah it was also an economy issue because of course the smaller the windows the cheaper they are and that's an important thing do you remember what this was do you remember what it was yeah what was it uh that little place an attic tiny attic with a really low roof right now you don't have to bed your head so the idea of having views from a house is a modern conception yes i mean it goes way back but it's something that was really kind of a big feature of modern architecture basically which is this idea of man inside a frame that is kind of looking and possessing the view and nature and so on so here again we've tried to keep the character of the house but of course opening up to the outside but not in this kind of maybe so much kind of uh treating what you see here as a backed up goal but more just kind of giving the inside more light more ventilation you know so more like a a fully haptical experience not just the view and that's it okay the best way so here we are in the top floor that's the level where we room a more transformation yeah so this was probably the only room that really tried to face outward yeah yeah i mean this is probably even like a newer addition you know this might be might have been a roof so what we're doing here is we're taking all this wall out and replacing it by two big doors that you can fully open and then there's a kiaras [Music] the castle and the church behind the entry the entrance to the castles through the road the cyclists this is oh my gosh and it's the first fish i've seen i've seen more yesterday huge four big ones right there and then one back there you see them there's more there's like eight there's one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve what's your bedroom shape cringy what yeah nice bedroom oh can you go can you run to the denver here we're kind of approaching the section of the house which is not actually inhabitable ceilings are quite low and you'll see it here where we are taking a part of the floor and i mean we're doing this for an obvious reason that i mean this otherwise this space is a wasted space so this ceiling goes out and this is going on a slope so this space is quite high and then once it gets too low we just take it out communicate with the kitchen underneath the madeira you want to come down help me cook this in a way was kind of this uh you know this extra space probably they stored all furniture and some food and and so on but there was not something that was kind of inhabited since there is a difference between the street level and the level of this part of the facade then there's probably that's probably rock right yeah yeah we can see i mean you can see it here you see it here and here there's an issue with salinity and humidity which is something also that we have worked with so the idea with this basement is also that it's more permeable for example here there is no door there will be a door here that's a third room in the basement which is currently a garage so here this stair has to go out because it doesn't allow any communication between the rooms and it appears upstairs in a place which is rather strange and this becomes a living space yeah yeah yeah and of course you know just once we put a door with a the door and this also this part that you can open and it's all both glass the quality of the space totally changes because it's ventilated it's it has this view it has the light so it's just by changing a door you can transform a space in this case and it's important the context because you do have this not cobblestone but slate ground and you have beautiful houses all around there's something yeah you don't need to hide from your neighbors you don't need to fear your neighbors in a way hopefully there's this idea that we all have here in the mediterranean that you can take out a chair here and it's fine and nobody kind of it's fine it's within our culture in a way and also expanding the house in this kind of very interesting spaces that you have so using the street as part of the inhabitable space there's no this kind of strong separation between house and street there's a again there's a much more dynamic flow you know and organic and natural and bueno pasado a horizontal we have three spaces here there's a cellar there was this storage room and then there was a parking the parking maybe at the beginning was used for a carriage and tools for working the land then when we bought it this space was a big storage area with a central place just to park a car but the working area the only way to get into this second room was through the outside you would do that why because maybe if you want to keep animals that's all rock or is there some all of it a little bit of lime in there and that's it right yeah wow a long time ago there was an animal probably so maybe these are the stables maybe this could have been these tables back in the day this last area was kept the most raw in the whole house it wasn't touched i think it it probably that brick that came afterwards was built for foundation purposes here you can see how they actually needed to to carve in the road this is a big rock this is crumbling uh lime and stuff and then this brick is more modern than that this other terracotta brick which could be from a long time ago in my opinion there is an aesthetic advantage is uh this house works uh almost like a like a gradient of intervention it comes it goes from the most primitive and raw at the bottom to the most to the lightest and and more sophisticated or more revamped because this one is rock brick and mortar walls that have never been painted with chemical paint they were plastered with lime that just got all over time so to me this is almost like art it feels very organic and very i feel i'm i mean uh almost like in an art gallery for example here this wall in front where i'm working it's just so many stories and textures you know there is a very wall and then there is the line plaster from the it's about the cement there is the rock part but also i have the stove it smells like wood i have the feeling i'm in a place that is inspiring this house has some big statements that are not easy the previous owner installed cement beams some decades ago so the architects came and they had and they saw this intervention that was not that country house type of intervention they had a challenge which was what do we do with cement beams do we hide them or do we do as modern architecture try to do which is let's expose the structure as it is and instead of just hiding it let's celebrate it this is the cheapest actually these cement blocks you normally don't see them but here there is a lot of ingenuity in the way they use these plugs because they needed a structural element to hold the new beams and then other things such as how the electricity is installed which is you know you have a block two positions one position you don't need any service the other position you just flip it and then you have the two holes you can cover one of the holes the other you can leave it like this if you want to it's gonna give you not only perspective of the place to put things inside for example and then the other you feel the electricity goes inside you can see that the way the cables go is very honest it's always shown you need a lab wall you need a lamp or the minimum expression of lamp right and it works you know it's a bulb that works you can bring it to different places where you need it or you can change it and actually you can use the same system for you know building something that has more lights this is another of the architects proposals it was uh complicated for us to kind of like make sense of so many bulbs but uh especially in this floor i do think that it does have uh an interesting perspective of things here we start moving things around a little bit more because here we find you know like one two three four rooms including um a kitchen and a toilet they are good in size but not very well connected so what we are doing here is basically taking all these walls out and turning all these into one big space this central space here will still be the kitchen but all this goes out we keep the fireplace you know this is kind of an arrow passage so once we take all this out whenever we do this uh widen these doors or make these doors new then it creates these kind of deep thresholds where you can not only kind of be aware that you're going from one space to the other but actually that contain all the services water electricity and so on oh ah [Music] this video was great and these they're bigger right it feels bigger or something yeah man amazing interesting the brick stuff do you like it it's a lot bathroom kitchen all together i mean right now it's not closed off right we need to reach for our white watch too inside baby i think so i like the texture here it's natural lime mixed with water on top of uh clay brick oh it's mine it's slime it's a mortar decal it's the old way of finishing uh exteriors especially series of houses across some places in the mediterranean we were working on this facade because actually the house had all concrete like concrete in that shape so they have to just take the concrete out this is a traditional treatment it's a lime it's mortar so it's it's lime and water basically and it doesn't even have a pigment [Music] do you like sleeping down here do you like do you think this works as a bedroom yeah you are in an ideal scenario natural light and access to the street connection to the rest of the house also thermal mass so ins you know that in summertime and really cold winter situations you are going to be in a in a stable temperature and in this case thermal mass is just overwhelming it's because we built against rock so this bottom floor we can notice how the main street that goes all the way to the castle on the church it's it's starting to reach this level at the beginning of the house you have to go to the to this level to the to the first floor to go in the street on the other side so this is the street on the other side this height is the street on the other side what you see there on the north side is rock pure rock is not brick and mortar so thermal mass being on rock is good in the future once you grow older or your kids also grow older and seeing how the house might evolve how these spaces can accommodate all these changes so sometimes i'm working and i see somebody coming [Music] precisely because there is no stasis or there is no kind of constant in a way the space and the place needs to be a constant disease there's a bird there's a bird who just came out of the water in the water now it's gonna come out oh one of the birds are back oh yeah there's so many birds oh yeah stay back not only kind of mentally there is this constant reference to a home or a you know a place that you can come back in a way you know your kids you you know you have this reference here this kind of center of the earth in a way and we understand that this can is done because the house can change but also because the quality again of the very very simple things you know light ventilation humidity temperature these very basic human things are there and the house keeps you there these things are always here you lie down you just look at the thing you look like you're on a boat bro if you look down what changes is how you use the spaces [Music] you figured it out what'd you figure out what we took out with burning totally burning production turtle you can smell it burning turn it off so you change and then the house changes with you but it's in just less and of course home is an idea of course it's a different thing for everyone but we try to uh approach it in a way that we understand at home is actually more the people that you live with i need to found the one word that we would sing for your family but your friends people you love that's what we understand is home and then there is this kind of place that you go back to and you need a place to go back to and that's this place the idea of home is a life in new york you

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 389,856

Keywords: ruin, abandoned house, rundown house, castle hamlet, family reunion home, country home, dream home, inside outside home, medieval home, barcelona, natural lime, lime paint, underground home, stone home, aixopluc, david tapias, ricard pau, mediterranean home, mediterranean forest, exposed cement, exposed brick, raw finish, wood fiber finish, corner window, framed views, lime mortar, air flow, low-tech, passive solar, home roof elevation, kirsten dirksen's house

Id: 5d5PaTYGZ-c

Length: 33min 31sec (2011 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 05 2021