Architect Diego Baraona has designed a remarkable trio of residential structures for three brothers in Santiago, Chile, who wanted to live as neighbors while maintaining their individual family privacy. The innovative project, located in the hilly Lo Barnechea neighborhood, represents a bold architectural experiment that balances communal living with personal space through creative design solutions.
The 36-year-old Chilean architect proposed an economical approach by creating essentially one house design repeated three times along the edge of the brothers' long and narrow property. Two of the houses are identical, while the third is a mirror image of the design. This strategy allowed for cost-effective construction while maintaining visual unity across the development. Baraona used an array of overlapping double beams and wall panels to visually connect the three discrete facades, creating a cohesive architectural composition.
The design places ancillary functions like garages, storage, and housekeeping quarters in a separate outbuilding along one side of the property, leaving a shared central patio between the main houses and the outbuilding. "There is a lot of life there, because people move back and forth, intermingling with playing kids, and they often leave the doors open," Baraona explains. This arrangement activates the communal space while allowing the houses to feel larger than their individual footprints would suggest.
Each of the three elevated houses spans 3,600 square feet and measures roughly 52 feet by 52 feet, following a nine-square grid layout. The central modules of this grid have been combined to create a single, elongated living and dining area, while the remaining spaces accommodate children's bedrooms, bathrooms, a lounge, and primary suites. The homes are wrapped in operable window-walls that can be opened to extend the living spaces outdoors.
A distinctive 6-foot-wide circulation pathway runs around the perimeter of each house, creating a loop between dark floors and ceilings. However, the interior palette changes dramatically in the main living spaces, which are lined with diagonally oriented white oak planks. Notable design features include floating bathroom vanities suspended from clusters of copper pipes, some of which serve as water supply and drainage lines. Pocket doors can be extended to incorporate the circulation space into rooms, effectively increasing their apparent size.
Baraona, who works as an amateur ceramist, collaborated extensively with local artisans to create unique architectural elements throughout the houses. These collaborations produced distinctive features including fabric guardrails made from ochre-dyed sheep's wool artfully knotted to steel balusters, wood surfaces gouged into wave-like scalloped patterns, and charcoal-colored concrete floors polished to reveal black aggregate. Even simple plywood wall panels were treated with stucco and stamped with fine agricultural netting to achieve a textile-like finish.
The central living and dining areas are sunken below the circulation level, creating a sense of intimacy and privacy within the open floor plan. The change in elevation helps define the space while maintaining visual connections to other areas of the house. A freestanding kitchen and half-bathroom can be hidden behind curtains made from the same yellowish wool used on the stairs. "Sometimes when you throw a dinner party you just want to hide all the mess," Baraona notes.
The most striking feature of each house is an otherworldly second-story space enclosed within a fiberglass shell. Originally conceived as a "giant lantern" to bring natural light to the central living area below, the design was inspired by Isamu Noguchi's Akari light sculptures and traditional parchment lamps. These contemplative spaces create a paradoxical experience - despite being reached by climbing stairs, they feel like mysterious subterranean chambers due to their thick-appearing shells and deep recessed skylights that cast an ethereal glow.
The fiberglass envelopes, despite appearing substantial from the interior, are actually only a few inches thick. From the exterior, the skylights project outward like telescopes pointed at celestial bodies. The families use these flexible spaces variously as playrooms, home gyms, and studies. "I approached this project not to solely build a house but to design an experience, an atmosphere," Baraona explains.
This formal experiment follows a path pioneered by earlier architects like Frederick Kiesler, who envisioned novel domestic spaces with his unbuilt Endless House in the 1920s, which similarly positioned amorphous volumes atop rectilinear structures. Baraona exercises more restraint by offering residents optional refuge rather than imposing an entirely new way of living.
Working with fiberglass presented significant challenges for Baraona, who admits this was both his first and likely his last project using the material. Finding a builder willing to experiment proved difficult until he partnered with a company that typically uses fiberglass to encapsulate toxic waste. The design team created full-scale mockups from inexpensive lumber, which then served as formwork for applying the fiberglass. Once hardened, each shell was cut into six pieces for transport to the site, where they were rapidly assembled and permanently fused together over approximately two days per house.
The fiberglass enclosures are self-supporting and hang from steel decking that forms the second-story floors, curling up and around to envelop the spaces. While necessary insulation prevented the intended translucency of the shells, the design successfully introduced natural light to the living spaces below through clerestories created by transferring the shells' weight to eight raised columns, each just 4 inches wide.
The project, which took approximately six years to complete and was finished in December 2024, demonstrates the rewards and challenges of experimental architecture. It requires clients willing to accept extended timelines and unconventional solutions, but the results offer a refreshing alternative to mass-produced housing. On the outskirts of Santiago, Baraona has successfully synthesized rectilinear and biomorphic forms, practical and impractical elements, creating architecture that pushes boundaries while remaining livable. Such experimental approaches by architects willing to take risks continue to advance the field and explore new possibilities for residential design.
