A striking residential project in Gaüses, Spain, demonstrates how thoughtful architectural design can seamlessly blend built structures with their natural surroundings. The Butterfly House, completed in 2025 by Tallerdarquitectura and led by architect Bernat Llauradó Auquer, showcases innovative design principles that prioritize environmental integration and spatial harmony across its 146 square meters.
The project's most distinctive feature is its V-shaped roof structure, which serves multiple functional and aesthetic purposes. This dramatic angular cover shelters all the home's various spaces while creating protective overhangs that shield the interior from sun and rain. More importantly, the V-shaped design minimizes the visual impact of the building's mass, allowing the architecture to integrate naturally into the rural environment rather than dominating it.
Photographer Adrià Goula's documentation reveals how the house rises from a stone foundation amid dense hedging, creating a series of carefully orchestrated volumes that unfold between courtyards, planters, and flower beds. The design ultimately opens toward a front garden, establishing a clear relationship between interior and exterior spaces.
The architectural sections reveal the sophisticated relationship between the building's volumes, interior spaces, and garden connections. The design creates diverse relationships between the inhabited spaces and what the architects describe as "domesticated nature," incorporating planters, flower beds, and trees at various levels throughout the composition.
The project creates what the architects describe as "a world of reflections and transparencies among the plants, the glass, and the interiors." Residents experience the sensation of walking through a garden daily, with fragments of green space succeeding one another throughout the interior. Each interior corner has been designed with a corresponding outdoor counterpart, creating visual and spatial continuity.
According to the design team, the surrounding vegetation and environment are integral parts of the architecture itself. The architects explain that architecture extends far beyond built boundaries, as spaces expand and the sensations created through architectural design relate directly to how spaces are formed, how the building's volume relates to its surroundings, and what views are achieved from interior spaces.
This philosophy becomes essential to the project's success, as various corners of the house offer opportunities to enjoy vegetal and visual elements in diverse rather than monotonous ways. Each space contains its outdoor counterpart, whether a patio, planter, flower bed, view of the rural neighborhood, or cluster of trees.
The house sits strategically positioned to take advantage of its rural setting while maintaining privacy through careful landscape design. The dense hedging provides natural screening while the stone base grounds the structure both literally and figuratively in its environment. The interplay between solid and transparent elements creates dynamic visual experiences throughout the day as light conditions change.
The V-shaped roof not only provides practical weather protection but also creates interesting interior ceiling geometries that add architectural drama to the living spaces. The angular forms cast changing shadow patterns throughout the day, creating a dynamic interplay of light and shadow that enhances the connection between indoor and outdoor environments.
Tallerdarquitectura's approach to this project represents a sophisticated understanding of how contemporary residential architecture can respond sensitively to rural contexts. Rather than imposing an urban aesthetic on the countryside, the design works with existing landscape conditions to create something that feels both modern and contextually appropriate.
The project demonstrates that successful residential architecture in rural settings requires careful consideration of massing, materials, and landscape integration. The Butterfly House achieves this through its distinctive roof form, thoughtful siting, and careful orchestration of interior-exterior relationships that make the building feel like a natural extension of its site rather than an intrusion upon it.
The completed project stands as an example of how contemporary architecture can enhance rather than compete with natural settings, creating homes that feel both thoroughly modern and deeply connected to their environments. The success of the Butterfly House lies in its ability to create a dwelling that truly embodies the concept of living within a garden setting.
