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An outdoor stairway curves around the largest in a series of villas (1 & 2), leading to an expansive common area (3). Photos © Edmund Sumner (1), Oscar Caballero (2 & 3), click to enlarge.

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Working with the linear shape of the plot, the design team proposed a sequence of six largely independent modules set into the slope and shaded by spindly oyamel firs. The first contains service areas, including a luminous kitchen, plus bedrooms; the second, a soaring common area; and the third, a pair of casual dens, one for adults and one for kids. The remaining three volumes, all duplexes, contain two bedrooms each, two of them shared among the kids and the remaining four for the adult couples. Save for the service module, the house’s components repeat the same form, with blind lateral walls, a glazed west-facing facade, and a semicircular enclosure at the back to soften the structures’ interaction with the hillside. Stone-paved stairs tumble down the slope between each module, connecting to a garden hemmed by a free-form wall assembled from rocks recovered during excavation. Liberally planted with succulents, ferns, and flowering wild kopieva, the wall resembles a low boundary between agricultural plots, like a remnant of some long-lost farmhouse. Within Sordo Madaleno’s offices, the house is known as Rancho El Bosque, or Forest Ranch.

With all its circulation extracted from the built space and open to the elements, the disarticulated house forces a close relationship to the elements, from the dry heat of late spring—when the surrounding woods turn a pale, dusty ochre—to the daily downpours and exuberant greenery of summer. “I don’t think the clients were expecting that at first,” Sordo Madaleno says, “but I want to design projects that don’t just sit as objects on the land.” Lovers of the outdoors, the family quickly agreed to the house’s unorthodox layout and lack of ceremony—the absence, for instance, of a front door or even a garage. “We weren’t interested in a language, we were interested in a strategy,” Sordo Madaleno says. “And nature was the protagonist.”

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The villas (4) offer privacy, but the family can reconvene in the common area (5). Photos © Oscar Caballero (4), Edmund Sumner (5)

The approach to the nearly 8,000-square-foot house (not to mention its scale) seems, at least initially, to belie this attitude of humility. Located off a dirt road that passes just above the house’s roofline, Rancho El Bosque comes into view as a stark composition in concrete: an arid plaza for parking framed by a single story of pale pink walls and focused on a voluptuous abstract bronze by Emilio Garcia Plascencia. A shallow stair descends around the back of the common area’s volume, leading to a half-covered vestibule where a white oak door swings open to reveal the lofty 15-foot ceilings of the shared living space. A wall of white limestone, split in the middle to accommodate a bar, follows the curve of the structure’s rear—tucked behind it are a pair of immense bathrooms and the wine cellar the clients requested—while the front opens entirely to a cinematic view of the forest draped over the sloped shoulders of an extinct volcano. A 16-foot-deep overhang allows the family to keep the floor-to-ceiling sliding doors open even in heavy rain.

Sordo Madaleno’s design for Rancho El Bosque did not end at the boundary of its built area. Instead, they approached the plot as a master plan in miniature, unspooling a network of trails between fragrant pines and gnarled live oaks. Wooden footbridges span seasonal brooks and ravines, connecting a sequence of clearings: a half-court for basketball, a kitchen garden, a manmade pond, a shaded picnic area—products of ideas that emerged as the architects and clients traversed the terrain together. “It was incredible to walk the site, to see the color of the soil. It all became inspiration,” says Sordo Madaleno. The office’s strategy of integration is clear from inside the forest: the house disappears entirely, submitting to the landscape that determined its form.

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