Javier Zubiria reinterprets the architecture of the Basque caserío

The caserío —baserri in Basque— is far more than an architectural typology: for centuries it has been the basic economic and social unit of the rural Basque world, a construction conceived to house, under a single roof, the family home together with the stable, the granary and the hayloft. Built in hewn stone, with a rectangular floor plan and a broad gable roof whose ridge runs perpendicular to the main façade —traditionally oriented toward the south—, the caserío is also recognized by its projecting eave, supported on wooden struts, and by its internal organization: the ground floor given over to agricultural and livestock uses, and the upper floors reserved for the dwellin.

Building on that typological foundation, and with the firm intention of reinterpreting it in a contemporary key, Javier Zubiria sets out his intervention in this caserío perched on a hilltop in the Basque Country. The project starts from an original footprint of 23 x 23 metres that once divided the life of four families; today it houses a single one. That shift in domestic scale is, precisely, the starting point of the entire architectural exercise: how to give new life to a volume conceived for an economy and a society that no longer exist, without giving up what that architecture represents.

The original stone is preserved and reused

Zubiria preserves and reuses the original stone of the north and south façades, but frees up its composition, opening up gaps wherever the new interior programme calls for it, not where tradition once placed them. «A house is usually described as ‘four walls and a roof’», the architect explains; «in this project we define it as ‘four parallel walls and a roof’». Under that idea, the caserío’s large volume is divided into three clearly differentiated parts, a strategy that also makes it possible to control the interior climate of each space independently.

The central space, an area of welcome

The central space acts as an area of welcome. An interior courtyard filled with vegetation connects the different levels of the house, both visually and physically, while a solid wood staircase —with a handrail of carefully crafted workmanship— receives the light from the overhead skylight. To the south, oriented toward the views, sit the day area on the ground floor and the bedrooms on the upper floors, behind the stone façade that Zubiria chooses to emphasize as a monumental element, visible from multiple points in the surroundings —a direct nod to the southern façade that already organized the traditional caserío—. To the north, an open, high-ceilinged space functions as a flexible-use studio or workshop.

The simplicity and elegance of the original architecture

The material palette —oak flooring, stone, stucco and solid wood beams set against a white background— seeks the same simplicity and elegance that characterized the original construction, while the transition between interior and exterior is resolved smoothly, without friction. The result is an intervention that understands respect for heritage not as immobility. As Zubiria himself sums it up: «To pay homage to a building or a city does not mean refraining from intervening, or simply copying how things were done centuries ago. It means giving new life to the space, capable of connecting with and inspiring the citizens of this particular moment in history.» A thought that, applied to this caserío, points to a broader question: how Basque architectural culture might evolve without ceasing to recognize itself in its own roots.

Project: Caserío vasco.
Surface area: 1.111 m².
Architect: Javier Zubiria Gallastegui. zU-Studio.
Technical Architect: Lander Arregui.
Structural Engineering: INAK.
Construction: Koldo Kerejeta.
Photography: Pedro Pegenaute.
Source: zU-Studio.

Javier Zubiria

Javier Zubiria was born in San Sebastián in 1986 and now works from Amsterdam, where he founded zU-studio. The practice builds on a language that is unmistakably sculptural: the structure itself carries the character of each project, and functionality and wellbeing develop together rather than in separate stages. Zubiria trained at ETSAUN (University of Navarra) and spent two years working alongside his former professor, Luis María Uriarte, before setting up zU-studio in 2015. He chose Amsterdam, a city he barely knew at the time, for the room it gave him to think without constraints.

Zubiria approaches architecture as an extension of human connection: understanding people, he says, is what allows a project to carry real meaning. That understanding shapes how the studio works — hand sketches, site visits, open conversation with the client — and it also shapes which commissions the studio takes on, choosing projects where that connection is already in place.

The same attention to context and to the natural setting runs through his renovation of a farmhouse in the Basque Country, where the original building’s character is preserved even as its use is rethought for the present.

Among the studio’s key projects is the Drift Museum, developed within the wider transformation of Van Gendt Hallen in Amsterdam. There, Zubiria and his team have turned a 25,000-square-metre industrial building into a cultural space that engages directly with the work of the Dutch duo Drift, pairing a cross-laminated timber (CLT) structure with careful attention to the building’s historic fabric.

In Santa Teresa, Costa Rica, the N2 house takes its cue from the birds that pass over the coastline: its sculptural roof, drawn from the form of a bird’s plumage, sets up a continuous route between indoors and outdoors within the surrounding tropical landscape.

Two retail projects for Polette show how differently the studio can respond to a single brief. The Paris showroom (2022) takes the form of an inverted pyramid, built around the idea of “the world upside down,” while Imagine Polette in Antwerp (2022) turns the store itself into an instrument, referencing John Lennon’s Imagine through two full-scale piano keyboards that visitors can play.

Project by Javier Zubiria