Based on the logic that for centuries shaped the Galician rural dwelling, Sinaldaba designs a very different house in Cambre (A Coruña)

Building a house in rural Galicia always meant negotiating with the place. Negotiating with the persistent rain, with the wind from the northwest, with a slope that rarely offers a horizontal plane for free. Galician popular architecture responded less to an aesthetic ideal than to a set of practical reasons that, over time, ended up defining a recognisable image. The granite walls, up to a metre thick in the oldest houses, sought to insulate against the damp cold of winter and to keep the interior cool in summer, in an Atlantic region where humidity is a constant throughout the year. The closed, compact gabled roof solved the drainage of rainwater with minimum complication. The hórreo, raised on pillars, protected the grain from ground damp and from rodents, needing nothing more than a good arrangement of stone and wood. The galerías filled the interior of the house with light. The patio, far from being a decorative addition, was part of the system of domestic life. In the patio, people grew food, stored it, and worked sheltered from the wind..

That logic, more than those forms, is what Casa Cecebre recovers, the house that the A Coruña–based studio Sinaldaba —founded in 2010 by Susana Vázquez Pérez and Ignacio Reigada Cordido— has built in the locality of Sobreguexe, in the parish of Cecebre, in the municipality of Cambre (A Coruña). The architects themselves explain it plainly: “The house does not seek to reproduce a traditional image or rely on nostalgia, but rather to recover the reasons that for centuries shaped Galician rural architecture: compactness, shelter from the climate, careful siting on the land and a restrained scale.”

A single volume with a gabled roof

The house is organised as a single volume with a gabled roof that sits on the sloping ground, half buried at its lowest point. Below the main level, the concrete lower floor accommodates service uses and parking, sheltered beneath the overhang of the volume above; above it, the floor given over to domestic life rises light and compact, with a white façade that, from the street, barely reveals what happens inside. Compactness here is selective. To the north, the house closes completely against the prevailing cold and damp; to the south and west, it opens in search of light and the warmth of the afternoon.

A central courtyard with a curved layout

The most singular element of the project, and the one that best sums up its logic, is the central courtyard, a void with a curved, almost circular layout, around which the whole life of the house is organised. Its geometry, alien to the orthogonality of the volume that wraps around it, introduces a deliberate tension that softens the whole and reinforces the relationship between the house, the landscape and the calm rhythms of domestic life. Light gravel covers the ground, with a single tree planted at its centre; around it, doors and windows cut into the white wall frame the courtyard from the living room, the kitchen, the library or the bedrooms. It is an intermediate space, neither wholly interior nor wholly exterior, that allows the outdoors to be inhabited all year round and everyday life to adapt to the seasons. The architects call it a domestic refuge.

Wood tempers the rawness of the concrete

Inside, the exposed concrete of the ceiling follows the slope of the roof and comes down to rest on a wall of pale, ribbed concrete block, pierced by tall windows and glazed doors that frame the courtyard and the surrounding landscape. Plywood lines the library, the kitchen and much of the fitted furniture, and tempers with its warmth the rawness of the exposed concrete. The living room, dining room and kitchen are arranged in a single space that follows the curve of the courtyard, while a work corner, lined with wooden shelving up to the ceiling, is tucked behind a low wall without losing its visual connection to the rest of the house.

Sinaldaba does not reproduce the hórreo, or the galería, or the granite wall: it works with what those elements resolved. Compactness, selective closure, the courtyard as the heart of domestic life and a scale that respects the landscape are, in Casa Cecebre, the same response that for centuries shaped the Galician house, translated without nostalgia into a contemporary language. As the architects themselves put it: “A contemporary house, rooted not in an image of the past, but in the reasons that for centuries made it possible to live in Galicia.”

Project: Casa Cecebre
Location: Lugar de Sobreguexe, Cecebre. Cambre (A Coruña).
Completed: 2026.
Architecture: Sinaldaba.
Architects: Susana Vázquez Pérez e Ignacio Reigada Cordido.
Team: José Rodríguez Anta, Cristina Manzanera Ramos.
Structure and site supervision: Marcial de la Fuente – Calcugal.
Builder: Gespronor.
Carpentry: Noal.ma.
Lighting: Halo Iluminación.
Photography: Luís Díaz Díaz.

Sinaldaba

Architects Susana Vázquez Pérez and Ignacio Reigada Cordido found Sinaldaba in A Coruña in August 2010, after completing their training together at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de A Coruña (ETSAC-UDC), where they study architecture, complete a master’s degree and a doctorate, and add work and collaboration with other studios. Reigada also takes part in several editions of the arquia/próxima festival run by the Fundación Arquia with projects such as the renovation of an attic on Calle San Andrés in A Coruña or a student residence and sports centre in Riga: the kind of exercise, between built work and competition entries, that marks the start of a trajectory that soon finds its own form.

That own form is defined by its size. Sinaldaba remains, by choice, a small studio. “We are a small studio, with an almost artisanal way of working,” its founders explain, and it is this scale that allows them to devote to each commission the time and the thoroughness it demands. There is no method that repeats itself from project to project: there is a way of looking, attentive to context, that understands that each place and each client are different and that, therefore, each response must be different too. Hence a contemporary and sustainable architecture, but one loaded with identity, tradition and reflection, that runs through design, urban planning, new construction and, above all, rehabilitation and intervention in heritage.

It is in rehabilitation that the studio finds its truest ground. From small apartments in the historic centre of A Coruña to entire buildings in Vigo, Sinaldaba designs from a respect for what already exists, restoring and recovering rather than replacing, adding new layers that coexist with the old ones like strata of a single work. That same care carries over into the design of hospitality spaces such as the Noa Boutique Hotel, one of the most beautiful hotels in A Coruña, in the Santa Cruz neighbourhood, endowed with great warmth thanks to the exquisite use of wood as its great protagonist.

Recognition has come alongside that body of work: the COAG XX award for interior design and selection in the rehabilitation category, the APROIN 2021 rehabilitation award, finalist in the Xunta de Galicia 2023 rehabilitation awards and the World Luxury Hotel Awards 2022, as well as wins in competitions such as the one for the CIDEA headquarters and, more recently, the rehabilitation of San Andrés 88 for the IGVS. Media from different countries have published their work, and the studio has taken part in various exhibitions.

Their most recent project, Casa Cecebre, sums up the criterion that runs through their entire body of work. Vázquez and Reigada develop the principles of Galician architecture –compactness of volumes, protection against the climate, precise siting, a balanced relationship with the surroundings– without reproducing its traditional forms.

Project by Sinaldaba