A thin white-concrete plane folds and steps down a hillside to enclose Bellavista 11, a minimalist home overlooking the sea in Ibiza, designed by Spanish studio Fran Silvestre Arquitectos.
Bellavista 11 is the first villa to be completed in The Roca Views development, a cluster of six homes designed by the Valencia-based studio in the town of Roca Lisa on Ibiza's eastern coast.
The villas will be united by pared-back, rectilinear forms with thin white walls, designed by Fran Silvestre Arquitectos as a contemporary take on the island's traditional white-walled buildings.
"The project begins with a very simple question, 'Can we build on this hillside by placing a single element on it?'," studio founder Fran Silvestre told Dezeen.
"The aim is to create a continuous element that follows the topography and, through its different folds, gradually finds the best conditions offered by the site," he explained.
"It is an apparently very simple operation that allows many things to be resolved at once – adapting to the slope, organising the programme, orienting each room towards a different condition of the landscape and extending the architecture to generate shade."
Bellavista 11 is divided across three low-slung volumes, beginning at the top with a garage and access stair, moving through to a central social volume and ending in a block of five bedrooms.
The thin white concrete plane that defines the home is just 15 centimetres thick. As it steps down the site, it creates expansive roof terraces atop the lowest two volumes, folding around to create the interior floor plates and a series of lower terraces.
"We like to think in terms of an evolved tradition, learning from what works in Mediterranean architecture – shade, protection from the sun, clarity of materials – and resolving it through contemporary construction techniques," said Silvestre.
Alongside the open-plan living, dining and kitchen space is a swimming pool, while the bedroom block overlooks a seating terrace. Both are accessed via walls of full-height sliding glass doors with slender frames and hidden tracks.
The villa's interiors continue the deliberate simplicity of the exterior, with white walls, pale stone floors and timber carpentry chosen to emphasise the movement of light and shadow across surfaces throughout the day.
"White appears naturally because of its relationship with traditional Mediterranean architecture and because of its performance under intense solar radiation," Silvestre explained.
"At the same time, it allows light to transform the spaces throughout the day. This is something that particularly interests us, we understand light almost as another material within the project."
Silvestre founded his eponymous practice in 2005. The studio previously used a similarly singular geometric gesture for a home in Madrid, which is housed in a cluster of white cylindrical volumes.
Its other recent projects include the stepped Villa 95 in Andalusia and the winding Sabater House in Alicante.
The photography is by Jesus Orrico.
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