In this house in Quito, contemporary architecture engages with Andean building tradition

Puembo is today a municipality absorbed by Quito’s expansion, an urban spread advancing over what, barely two decades ago, was a suburban landscape of rammed earth walls, generous gardens and the kilns where artisans fired clay bricks. That craft and that texture — clay shaped by hand and cured over slow heat — belong to a memory that growth is erasing rapidly. Casa Dominga is built on that memory. The project by Nicolas&Nicolas, completed in 2025, starts from a question about the place and the family that will inhabit it.o

Two volumetric systems

The starting point is the formation of a new home. The architects read in that circumstance an opportunity to work with the geometry of bonds: union and individuality, the shared and the personal. The house translates this into two volumetric systems that coexist in productive tension.

A white ring runs along the perimeter of the ground floor, embraces the garden, deforms to respect the pre-existing vegetation and projects its cantilevered roof over the exterior space, providing visual and solar protection for the interior spaces and their occupants. It is an ultra-lightweight steel structure, capable of the continuous, fluid gesture that contemporary construction systems allow.

Above and from it, the second-floor volumes, built with a light steel frame, rise tall and compact, clad in artisanal clay brick and recycled tiles recovered from local artisans.

The narrative function of materiality

The choice of materials carries a narrative function. The bricks evoke the kilns disappearing from the immediate context and connect with the Andean building tradition of massive, opaque, weighty volumes. The white ring develops the opposite register — light, continuous, open to the garden and the sky — and the house works with that difference as if the two systems needed each other to make sense.
The interior materiality maintains the same purposeful austerity. Polished concrete floors run through the ground floor with continuity and tactile coolness; the concrete structure gives way to steel on the upper level, lighter in both behaviour and appearance. The cantilevered stair treads organise the transition between floors with a sculptural presence that natural light, filtered through skylights, amplifies throughout the day.

The garden

The garden, designed by Lorena Velasco, densifies the exterior space with vegetation growing between the folds of the ring and around the pre-existing trees, making the outdoor route an indistinguishable part of daily life.

Casa Dominga totals 450 square metres of built area on a 1,000 sqm plot. A domestic scale that the project manages with precision: what the house offers those who move through it is a density of decisions within a contained surface.

Project: Casa Dominga.
Type: Single-family house.
Location: Puembo, Ecuador.
Built area: 450 m².
Plot area: 1.000 m².
Completed: 2025.
Architecture: Nicolás&Nicolás. Architects: Nicolás Vivas y Nicolás López.
Landscape design: Lorena Velasco.
Site manager: Ing. Willan Mora.
Concrete structure: Argu Projects.
Steel structure: Simetrika.
Structural engineering: Vanegas Martinez.
Hydraulic engineering: Ing. Diego Tello.
Electrical engineering: Ing. Jorge Gomez.
Drawings: Gabriela Velasteguí – Nicolás Rosero.
Photography: JAG Studio.
Source: Nicolás&Nicolás.

Nicolas&Nicolas

Nicolas&Nicolas is a contemporary architecture and design studio founded in Quito in 2017 by architects Nicolás Vivas and Nicolás López Ayoub. Based between the Ecuadorian capital and Barcelona, the studio operates from a singular position: that of two professionals trained in Latin America and Europe who engage with their cultural heritage without being defined by it. Their practice spans architecture, interior design and object design, united by a consistent attitude: the dialogue between memory and innovation, between the local and the universal.

The studio pursues an integrated approach to design, working across scales from architecture to the object, through interiors, textile design and art. That breadth of scope is coherence, not eclecticism — a conviction that a well-resolved space is one that addresses all its layers at once. Their projects, developed primarily in Ecuador and Spain, reflect a commitment to material quality, environmental awareness and durability as a form of resistance to the ephemeral.

Nicolás Vivas

Nicolás Vivas graduated with honours in Architecture from Universidad San Francisco de Quito in 2012 and completed his training with a Master’s in Industrial Design for Architecture at the Politecnico di Milano between 2016 and 2017. Before founding Nicolas&Nicolas, he built a solid career in Ecuador and the United States: nearly eight years as a senior architect and project designer at Estudio A0 in Quito, a formative period at the acclaimed Californian practice Brooks + Scarpa Architects in Los Angeles, and a further stint at Contract Workplaces focused on workplace design. That accumulation of scales and geographies — the landscape-informed architecture of the American West Coast, the technical rigour of Milan, the specificity of the Ecuadorian context — defines a sensibility capable of moving between references without losing its own thread.

Nicolás López Ayoub

Nicolás López Ayoub studied Architecture at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, where he first met Vivas, and went on to complete a Master’s in Design and Product Innovation at IED Spain in Madrid in 2019. His professional path led him to Teresa Sapey + Partners in Madrid, a firm known for its chromatic and sensory approach to large-scale interiors, before joining Nicolas&Nicolas full-time from Barcelona in 2020. His independent work — which includes interior projects in Madrid, Valencia and Quito, among them the transformation of a colonial house into a boutique hotel in the historic centre of the Ecuadorian capital — reveals an architecture attentive to atmosphere and the narrative of place. Based in Barcelona, where he also collaborates with 118 Studio, López Ayoub serves as a bridge between the studio’s Latin American practice and its European context.

Project by Nicolás&Nicolás